By Rachel Tuffney, EVP of US Operations at Dianomi

As if digital marketers have not had to deal with enough disruption in the past months, Apple’s recently released privacy feature – IOS 14.5 (ATT) is the latest curveball in a wave of policy changes from platforms or regulators making life difficult for marketers. While brands knew Apple’s privacy forward approach was coming, the world is just now seeing the real impact of this ATT update, which is giving consumers more access and power when it comes to what information is shared with advertisers.

In spite of all these changes, there are clear avenues that brands can take to ensure their messages and content are reaching consumers who are most likely to be receptive to them. The most important of which is contextual advertising and while it is not a new solution it is a proven way to drive scale.

Google recently announced the delay of the cookie disappearing until 2023 but third-party solutions are still diminishing. Leading brands are preparing for this change and are getting creative with how they build first-party data and rethink their targeting strategies. Contextual targeting has been around for years but has not always been used to its fully scalable capabilities. Fast forward to today, contextual is one of the key viable solutions left — contextual strategies, via native advertising, are an enlightened and smart way to overcome regulatory complexity whilst maintaining a highly effective audience-driven advertising campaign. Brands are already placing relevant ads in front of potentially interested consumers without cookies and third-party data.

Contextual is a dark horse strategy for distributing high-quality content that many brands invested in during a no-event pandemic period — like podcasts or white papers or e-books — to connect with audiences predisposed to niche subject matter, whether it’s about clean energy or crypto or luxury travel.

Contextual distribution does not have to rely solely on keyword targeting, it can be broader and much more scalable than that; focusing on serving ads into related content across a private marketplace of publishers.

Now with the economy showing signs of roaring back, the race is on among marketers to reach new customers, grow business and send sales into overdrive. And it’s the advertisers who have experimented with new approaches who have experienced substantial growth, whereas brands who have been subject to pandemic paralysis or who have refused to acknowledge consumers’ new boundaries and demands are getting left behind.

Developing technology to help brands improve their consumer connections

The effective use of data is the core ingredient to any digital marketing strategy. When contextual targeting first made its debut, it came with multiple limitations. An example of this is the contextual hierarchies provided by IAB; they were proven to be too broad for niche targeting. Since then, the solution has pivoted and more brands are giving contextual a second chance. The advertising industry continues to expand year after year, the future of targeted advertising will pivot to utilizing machine learning models to predict audience addressability. Advanced and successful algorithms have the power to predict audience designations for a given programmatic ad opportunity.

There are many advantages contextual offers besides the ability to protect user data that advertisers may not have known about. Contextual, enables advertisers to deliver messages to consumers when they are in a receptive frame of mind. While users are browsing content about a specific topic, it signals their intent during that moment —  Leading to be a more reliable indicator of purchase behavior than targeting based on previous browsing habits. Contextual targeting does not use private consumer data so it is the suitable choice among emerging solutions and is expected to continue to grow rapidly through 2025.

Originally Posted on LondonStockExchange.com on May 24, 2021

London Stock Exchange today welcomes Dianomi, a leading provider of native digital advertising services to premium clients in the Financial Services and Business sectors, following its successful IPO on AIM at a market capitalisation of £82 million.

The Company successfully raised £37 million through a placing of both existing shares and new shares. The £5 million raised by the issue of new shares will be used to expedite the Group’s organic growth and to expand the Group’s sales and marketing capabilities in North America and EMEA. The Company will trade under the ticker “DNM”.

Dianomi was established in 2003 and operates from its offices in London, New York and Sydney. The Company provides over 400 advertisers, including blue chip names such as Aberdeen Standard Investments, Invesco and Baillie Gifford, with access to an international audience of 438 million devices per month through its partnerships with over 300 premium publishers of business and finance content, including blue chip names such as Reuters, Bloomberg and WSJ.

Adverts served are contextually relevant to the content of the webpages on which they appear and mirror the style of the page, which enhances reader engagement. Spending by the Financial Services industry on digital advertising in the US alone has grown from $10.85 billion in 2017 to $19.62 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $23.56 billion in 2021 (source: eMarketer). 

Rupert Hodson, CEO of Dianomi said: “The response from investors to our IPO has been very gratifying. Joining AIM is an integral part of our strategy to significantly expand our business. Digital advertising is a rapidly expanding market as people shift to doing more online and our objective is to benefit from this trend and grow our market share. 

“Our IPO was a team effort and I would like to thank all of our people and advisers, who have been instrumental in getting us to where we are today. I would also like to take this opportunity to welcome our new shareholders to the register. We very much look forward to life as a public company and to seeing our business continue its growth journey.”

Advisers to the IPO include:

– Panmure Gordon, NOMAD, sole bookrunner and sole broker
– K&L Gates LLP, Company legal counsel
– Fieldfisher LLP, Broker legal counsel
– RSM Corporate Finance LLP, Reporting accountant
– Novella Communications, Financial Public Relations Adviser

Dianomi’s EVP, Rachel Tuffney, spoke with American Express’ Courtney Colwell for Brand Innovators‘ Women in Marketing Livecast Series

On April 6th, 2021 Rachel Tuffney spoke with American Express’ Courtney Colwell in a fireside chat for a segment of Brand Innovators’ Women in Marketing Livecast series. The conversation focused on how Colwell users her role as a woman in leadership to support the women on her team and how American Express is helping female small business owners respond to the challenges of the pandemic.
Click the image above to watch the full livecast and discover more content on the Brand Innovators website.

Bury brings extensive commercial development experience from Reuters, AOL, Reach PLC and News UK

New York, NY – March 4, 2021 – Dianomi, the financial and business-focused native ad marketplace for premium publishers (WSJ, Business Insider, and Reuters, among others) is pleased to announce the appointment of Jo Bury as the company’s first Head of Publisher Commercial Development. In his role, Bury will help to continue Dianomi’s strong record of revenue growth. He will be responsible for identifying new market opportunities, driving the publisher performance strategy and aligning Dianomi’s publisher Product Development, Account Management and Business Development teams for continued growth as the business expands further into the premium lifestyle vertical.

Bury brings over two decades of experience having previously led platform commercial development and strategic partnerships for publishers including Reuters, AOL, Reach PLC and News UK, where he was responsible for growing advertising and alternative revenues across display, programmatic, native advertising, e-commerce and video. He will play a key role in helping to grow Dianomi’s business by implementing a publisher centric approach to commercial development.

“We are thrilled Jo is joining the Dianomi team. He will be critical to the continued growth of the organization and our expansion into new verticals. Jo’s publisher experience in commercial development will be especially key to ensuring solutions from Dianomi help our customers grow yield whilst addressing pending privacy and data updates across the industry,” said Rupert Hodson, CEO at Dianomi. “This is the first time we have had a dedicated role to lead publisher commercial development at Dianomi and we see many areas of opportunities. Jo’s understanding of publisher needs as well as his passion for ad tech and innovation make him a great fit for our business as we continue to expand.”

“It’s an exciting time to be joining the Dianomi team. Dianomi’s native advertising platform is already delivering high yielding video and native demand into partners across multiple platforms through market leading contextually targeted formats,” commented Bury. “I’m looking forward to using my publisher experience to further grow the business through the development of improved analytics and insights, as well as new ad solutions and the expansion into new verticals.”

Bury will be based out of Dianomi’s London office and will report directly to Dianomi’s Chief Executive Officer, Rupert Hodson.

About Dianomi

Dianomi is the native ad platform for financial services, technology, corporate, and lifestyle advertisers providing publishers with high yielding demand across contextually targeted native and video ad units. Advertisers and Publishers trust Dianomi for our brand safety, transparent pricing, and insights. Our emphasis on high-quality audiences combined with contextually relevant content helps partners achieve higher ROI than other native ad platforms. For more information, go to http://www.dianomi.com.

Originally posted on MarketingProfs.

By Rachel Tuffney, EVP of US Operations, Dianomi

There’s never been a better time to understand the value of brand marketing. In 2021, people are hyper-aware of how brands are positioning themselves (as well as noting their silence) after the roller coaster of a year that was 2020. Moreover, the regulatory climate is compelling many marketers to find alternatives to third-party data and cookie-driven performance marketing.

At the same time, amid financial uncertainty, marketing leaders must defend every penny of marketing spend as CEOs and CFOs look for direct links between marketing spend and specific KPIs or business outcomes.

Yet, although marketers know it’s hard to measure their brand-building efforts, they also know it is that brand building via brand marketing drives loyalty and it can also lead to new consideration and intent that eventually increases demand.

So, how can marketers justify and defend budget for brand-building?

One concrete answer is to integrate brand marketing activity within a performance-driven campaign. In 2021, winning strategies will calibrate brand with performance execution. The secret weapon is contextual, or native, advertising.

Contextual strategies enable marketers to take brand-building assets and amplify them using performance-based strategies. That approach ensures that a brand’s message and content appear in precisely the right context, including the right environment, and that they are distributed efficiently at scale.

The combination can be an exponentially powerful brand builder.

Brand Marketing Within a Contextual Strategy

One approach is to deploy high-quality brand assets—whitepapers, infographics, e-books, or explainer videos—as part of a native content campaign. A contextual strategy allows for distribution of in-depth content—for example, service-oriented educational pieces from a financial services brand aimed at a first-time life insurance buyer—to the right audience (let’s say males age 40+) in the right environments (in business publications).

Most important, instead of using a standard cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) KPI, marketers can measure branded content via a cost-per-click metric in native. That’s a double win: Brand-building creative is delivered via targeted and measurable contextual platforms (wherein the brand pays only for the delivery that sparks a consumer engagement).

As privacy regulations go into effect and upcoming algorithm changes from big tech platforms force brands to rethink their reliance on legacy cookie-based targeting strategies, companies would do well to weave native content into the mix. People are hyper-aware of a company’s voice and reputation. They can quickly differentiate between meaningful and performative social responsibility initiatives, and that’s just as true for business-forward companies as it is for consumer-facing brands.

Contextual distribution strategies with a cost-per-click goal enable businesses to combine levels of quality control, audience targeting, and context that aren’t possible by relying solely on programmatic.

The combination of brand and performance can be an exponentially powerful brand builder—especially as a means to market effectively in an era when we’re still not back to a world of in-person events or business lunches.

Opting for the Right Context

The onset of the pandemic threw the world into anything-but-business-as-usual conditions. Companies and advertisers were quick to pull ads to avoid placements next to COVID-related content, leaving media publications hurting from ad revenue loss just as media consumption was at a high point.

The winners were the brands that didn’t pump the breaks on their marketing, but instead pivoted their creative to hit the right contextual note. Some financial companies, for example, offered timely advice on shifting investment strategies to account for volatility. Other companies, such as location data company Unacast, provided pro-bono data to reinforce the importance of social distancing as an essential measure in fighting COVID-19.

If we learned anything from the Stop Hate For Profit campaign against Facebook last summer, it’s that brand loyalty is on the line across the industry.

In short: identifying the right content is the first major step, followed by the context in which it is delivered.

Synergy of Performance and Brand Marketing

Despite the dynamics of the current climate, marketers are expected to deliver immediate ROI. Now is the time to reassess KPIs, marketing tactics, and creative toolkits, and to consider adding different delivery methods and measurement, such as cost-per-click options, to CPM-based campaigns.

Customers are paying close attention to the behavior, posture, position and positioning behind a brand message, and marketers need to prioritize methods that grant customers more control. Contextual or sponsored content can be a smart supplement or alternative to automated tactics to ensure brand messages are pulling through in a safe, premium environment.

As society struggles with COVID-19 and vaccines that signal light at the end of the tunnel, a strong brand message and presence are critical for companies to maintain customer loyalty. Service-oriented and authentic brand marketing can be important air cover that also influences customer acquisition and retention.

Using the right performance-based tactics to catapult pressing, engaging, and authentic native content in a premium, contextually relevant environment—and in front of the right audience at precisely their moment of interest—is a powerful way to augment campaign plans and deliver meaningful results.

Originally Posted by MarTech Series

By Rachel Tuffney

With third-party cookies gone from the ad industry’s menu, what’s the next substantial solution? Easy. Contextual targeting. While we’ve seen a few industry experts call for tech innovation to replace cookies, advertisers should be leaning in on what consumers are asking for from the ads they are served.

For instance, remember when publishers were blacklisted for seemingly no reason in March when their ads were considered offensive against pandemic-related news content?

Contextual targeting could have immediately been a workaround.

With 67% percent of consumers reporting that they are more likely to engage with contextual ads on trusted publishers, there is an opportunity for innovation in contextual and native advertising. Especially because whichever new identification process becomes the norm, advertisers will need to evolve as very few brands (B2B or B2C) have enough first-party data in their marketplaces.

Why Contextual Marketing?

Before digital advertisers implement a contextual strategy, it is important to understand that contextual targeting has evolved in the past decade. What was considered contextual in the past has, like most things, advanced. By using the latest technology, advertisers are able to identify relevancy at scale. Contextual targeting is privacy compliant since it is not based on consumer behaviors making it a quality solution in a cookieless world.

Another benefit is the transparency contextual provides and the ability for advertisers to look at the traffic being sourced from different publishers and determine which traffic source is the most profitable. Contextual allows advertisers to A/B test and adjust bids accordingly. Ads and content that are contextually aligned also help to improve ad attributions and brand lift compared to when ads and content are not aligned.

Keeping the Consumer Top of Mind

Having easy access to consumer data is something that advertisers have been able to leverage for many years. However, the evolution of consumer privacy law is making third-party data obsolete for digital advertisers.

Contextual targeting does not only meet the needs of B2B and B2C marketers and publishers but it also provides consumers with relevant content while meeting their own personal digital privacy needs. Advertisers should think through working with publishers who have created contextual targeting opportunities that truly understand a consumer’s behavior. For example, a consumer reading up on investment classes like ETFs across top business publications might be served a white paper on ETFs by a blue-chip brand at the end of the article.

Don’t Let Consumer Privacy Laws Scare You Away From Contextual Marketing

There have been many changes to GDPR and CCPA—as well as conversations at the state and national level in regards to adopting similar privacy regulations. This presents an opportunity for advertisers to educate key stakeholders on the importance of contextual as a solution and the opportunity to reach new customers.

While many U.S. companies are still waiting for the looming changes to third-party data, others like The New York Times and Dow Jones have already announced first-party data plans. The New York Times took a proactive approach to ensure the organization is GDPR compliant. The publisher made changes early last year due to a significant amount of subscribers being located in Europe.

Dow Jones, part of the News Corp group, recently shared that the publisher had released a tool that provides first-party data including audience insights both before and after a campaign is launched for advertisers.

New York Times immediately switched to contextual targeting and found they were able to continue to grow ad revenue. Even if a brand doesn’t currently operate in countries or states that have stricter consumer privacy laws they should experiment now with contextual. Californianians voted in November for stricter privacy guidelines with the CPRA signaling a wider trend that other states are already following (and new Vice President-Elect Harris, who championed CCPA in her home state of California, is rumored to be setting up a similar consumer protection bureau at the federal level). This is a trend that is just beginning.

Contextual is right for these times and will continue to play a role in targeting as we move into the new year. It helps publishers at a time when they’ve struggled with being blacklisted and are looking for solutions beyond cookies and third-party data. It’s also great for brands as it allows them to put their messages into context. Consumers benefit from relevant content that contextual provides. In a year in which everything has been turned on its head, marketing campaigns don’t need to be another headache. Consumers crave content they care about, and marketers want to provide the most relevant information to lead to conversions. Contextual targeting is not a maybe as we head into 2021; it is the only way forward.

Originally published on MarTech Series

Unique Ability to Reach the Financial Web Drives 64% YOY Revenue Growth in US in Q3 and Underscores its Role as a Key Revenue Stream for Publishers and In-Context Solution for Premium Brands

In an otherwise disruptive and challenging year in the publishing industry, Dianomi, the financial and business-focused native ad marketplace for premium brands and publishers, reported 58% revenue growth on a year over year basis, as well as an expanded roster of the world’s leading business and financial publishers as well as new brands. The company now serves more than 8.5 billion ads on 220 premium publications, reaching more than 340 million readers per month across the U.S., EMEA, and APAC.

“During the pandemic, we saw media consumption among the professional and business-minded audiences our publishers serve continue to grow and sustain,” said Rupert Hodson, CEO and co-founder of Dianomi. “Brands are seeing that our audiences seek out information to help them manage their businesses, their clients and their own portfolios, unlike the general population, which has experienced dips from news or election fatigue. They also appreciate being able to precisely connect with readers with relevant information about topics they’re actively leaning into, whether that’s more on asset classes like Gold or ETFs or on socially responsible or conservative investment strategies.”

Publishers who have joined or expanded their presence on the Dianomi platform include Dow Jones titles such as Barron’s, MarketWatch and The Wall Street Journal as well as The Washington Post, Kiplinger, The Times (of London), New York Magazine, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and TMX Money.

In addition, financial institutions and other premium brands who have begun working with Dianomi to better reach affluent, professional audiences include Aramco, FXCM and Schroders.

“Readers around the world are seeking out our trusted news, information and analysis to help them make their most important decisions in these uncertain times,” said Dan Shar, Chief Commercial Officer, Barron’s Group and GM, MarketWatch. “Our partnership with Dianomi centers around collaboration as we work together to think creatively about the best ways to provide maximum value to our readers.”

“Though most revenue channels were set back this year, Dianomi has been an outlier, growing monetization against all odds,” said Andy Price, Head of Revenue Operations US for Kiplinger’s parent, Dennis Publishing. “They have been a partner to us for almost a decade now, thanks to the impressive brands they work with and the quality of their content recommendation. Their reliable performance and commitment to quality standards have been invaluable, more than ever this year.”

“Dianomi has been a wonderful partner, consistently delivering advertising content that has exceeded our expectations and objectives,” said Kaja Szczechura, Head of Media Activation & Performance, Net Natives for NYU Stern School of Business.

“I have been using Dianomi’s native advertising services for a number of years, across different organisations and I’ve always been impressed with the reach and effectiveness of the platform. It’s also a real pleasure working with the team who are always willing to discuss different ways to target very niche audience groups,” said Caleb Culverwell, Senior Content Marketing Manager, Barclays Private Bank.

As brands look to reallocate ad budgets from social platforms and third-party, data-targeted display to more brand-safe environments, Dianomi rolled out a premium lifestyle vertical in H2 2020 to answer to advertiser demand for more premium, in-context and brand-safe solutions that operate at scale. Based on the same premise as its financial vertical, Dianomi’s lifestyle network is built on contextually relevant, premium publishers with cookieless targeting and charged on a performance basis. Dianomi has proven its ability to bring premium brands and publishers in the professional services and financial industries together and is building upon that expertise for lifestyle brands and publishers, starting initially with automotive, fashion, travel and hospitality verticals.

  • News & views

Are investors ready to put the difficulties of 2020 behind them? New data from Dianomi suggests that even before November’s market gains, investors’ appetite for news and analysis on leading asset classes was increasing at pace – and that investors were seeking out positive coverage.

Global stock markets rose sharply during the first half of November, as leading pharmaceutical companies announced positive news on potential vaccines for the Covid-19 virus. The gains reflect investors’ hopes that it may finally be possible to begin moving past the pandemic.

However, investors’ optimistic view of equity markets – and of other asset classes – appears to pre-date the vaccine announcements. Dianomi’s analysis of online financial coverage reveals that in October, investors consumed 17.2% more articles about equity markets than in September; even more impressively, consumption of fixed-income coverage was up by 22.9% in October.

Moreover, investors have in recent months been overwhelmingly opting to read neutral or positive coverage of these asset classes. By contrast, only a small proportion of articles consumed, both in fixed-income and in equities, could be characterised as negative, Dianomi’s analysis reveals. This represents a stark reversal since the summer, when the majority of coverage of these asset classes consumed by investors expressed negative sentiment.

In other words, Dianomi’s research suggests that not only are investors seeking out more coverage of leading asset classes, but also that in most cases they are looking for analysis where sentiment is positive, or at least neutral. Negative takes on fixed-income assets and stock markets have accounted for only a very small proportion of the content consumed in recent months.

The data reinforces the idea that investors are beginning to look through market volatility in search of opportunities – and that many investors are determined to capitalise on the potential upside for asset prices. In November, stockbroking platforms in the UK struggled to cope with the volumes of orders posted by investors as prices rose following the vaccine announcement.

November’s Presidential Election in the US may also be part of the picture, with political uncertainty in the world’s largest economy having worried investors for much of 2020. An end to that uncertainty – albeit with the potential for unlikely surprises with President Trump contesting the election outcome – may have boosted investors’ confidence.

Dianomi’s data certainly suggests investors have been shifting to a more upbeat view of the outlook for stocks and bonds. The aggregate sentiment of the stock market coverage consumed by investors was negative throughout July and August, Dianomi’s analysis shows, before turning positive in September, where it has since remained. In the fixed-income arena, aggregate sentiment remained positive over the summer – though only just – but moved sharply higher over the autumn months.

Investors’ consumption patterns when it comes to coverage of real estate and commodities also suggest a shift in sentiment. Overall consumption of content on these asset classes fell sharply during October, Dianomi’s data shows, but in both cases, investors have been seeking out more upbeat coverage. The proportion of articles that express negative sentiments has fallen sharply since the summer in the case of both real estate and commodities.

A move to a more positive outlook across asset classes may presage further gains to come on global markets with investors determined to capitalise on good news. For example, further positive announcements on Covid-19 vaccines and treatments – and a final determination of the Presidential race – offer potential for new market upside given the current sentiment of investors.

Investors appear minded to see the case for the upside. Indeed, October’s most-read article in Dianomi’s analysis underlines the point. MarketWatch’s story, headlined “Most investors now expect the US stock market to crash – why that’s good news”, is a classic example of looking for the positive takes during a potentially worrying time.