Publishers who employ programmatic are selling at the lowest possible price.  After programmatically purchasing its own display inventory, the Guardian found that only 30 pence of every pound spent was making it back to the publisher.  From cutting its native ad partners from seven to one, using only Dianomi, publisher Kiplinger expects to nearly double its native ad revenue within two years.  Publishers can turn to native as a mechanism for increasing ad revenue on their site. But, to see this value, native must also be done correctly. It all starts with “Understanding what native means to you.”
To watch the webinar please click here.

Last month, Dianomi announced that Mike Kelly of Kelly Newman Ventures joined Dianomi’s Board of Directors.  Mike is a 30 year veteran of the media industry and is currently a non-executive director of QuantCast, Celtra and Americantowns. With considerable expertise in the digital marketing sector, Kelly has held executive roles at a number of major media companies including: former Chairman of Unruly and former CEO of The Weather Channel. New York based Kelly Newman Ventures also participated in the funding raise.  We recently sat town with Kelly to get his take on the future of native advertising and why he decided to join Dianomi.
 

Q. Tells us about yourself?

It has been my good fortune to have had several high profile jobs in the media and advertising business over more than 30 years. It is a career that provided a front-row seat for all of the disruption and transformation that has shaped the industry and allowed me to have a hand in some of the big leaps forward in technology driven advertising, streaming, data solutions and cross platform.  My Business partner and I invest and advise emerging companies, and I am constantly intrigued and optimistic about the industry’s future and feel lucky to be so involved.
 
On a personal note, my wife and I live in NY and raised 3 children in the “burbs” of nearby Connecticut. ALL three of my brood live in NYC, so going to kids sports events and dance recitals has morphed into meeting for burgers and drink.  My wife is an advertising copywriter turned best selling author and we have both spent our adult life in the advertising and communications world.
 

Q. What excites you about Dianomi? Why did you join the board?

In many ways, we are early days in native and data driven content and advertising.  Dianomi is lucky to have a smart, driven team that has persevered in bringing quality and innovation to marketers and publishers besieged by generic solutions that erode user confidence.  As they say, there are “riches in niches” and financial, business and tech marketers and publishers prefer partners who cater to their industry, not one size fits all. Having worked in the past at Fortune Magazine, I have seen firsthand the dynamics of the industry and Dianomi is among the few to recognize the power of a vertical and the power of native advertising and can create a flywheel effect of better content, better engagement, deeper data understanding and better results.  
 

Q. Where is the native industry going? How should publishers and advertisers be looking at the space for the long term?

Advertising as we know it is in a state of permanent change. Graphical display ads and commercials won’t go away, but we are seeing an acceleration of new ways to connect to customers and prospects.
 
It’s a simple proposition. As consumers reject the current formats, can that real estate be replaced by something just as valuable but certainly more brand reinforcing?  Native fills that void as do some other emerging formats like content driven commerce etc.
 
A lot of first generation native companies took a blunt instrument approach and so they are only replacing one ineffective format with another. Our approach is much smarter and therefore gets better results.
 

Q. You’ve worked in several marketing leadership role, including Time Warner Inc. From that point-of-view, what are some innovations on the horizon that marketers should take notice of?

Having seen how digital has evolved and affected media and advertising over a long arc, it goes something like this: things that seem fantastic, improbable, uneconomic and impractical, usually become a part of everyday life (ie the internet, smartphones, amazon, facebook, search etc etc etc) and then they are completely taken for granted as a part of the fabric of the industry.  That is Artificial Intelligence/machine learning right now. It is great we are in the position we are in to go deep into our industries and put the data to work solving problems for our customers.
 

Q. What’s next for your tenure at Dianomi?

My Job is to help the team and our investors (which includes me!) make our company famous! First board meeting in April 18th, and the sky’s the limit.

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Today, we’re excited to announce that Dianomi has taken on a round of investment from BGF and that Mike Kelly has joined the board of Dianomi as non-executive Chair. The investment from BGF will help us address the growing demand for Dianomi’s native content marketing platform; the development of new products; and expansion into new markets including adding new staff.
Over the past year, Dianomi has invested in new products that will maximize the native investments of brands and the native ad businesses of publishers.  Our insights provide brands with data into the topics of content and products trending with their target customers, and through Dianomi’s proprietary DMP, brands are able to target audiences based on trending content topics, amongst other data sets.
Some of you may recognize the name Mike Kelly. Mike was formerly President of AOL, Media Networks, and President of Global Marketing for Time Warner. Mike has also served as non-executive director of QuantCast and Bankrate, among other companies, and has considerable expertise in the digital marketing sector.
Our goal for 2018 and beyond is to continue to innovate for our customers while keeping to our core mission of distributing sponsored content in the right context and at scale. This means making some new hires and rolling out some innovative new products that we’ve had in our pipeline. We look forward to sharing more details as we have them.
New York based Kelly Newman Ventures also participated in the funding raise.
Full press release here.
 

Andrew Gussman, Dianomi’s vice president of U.S. sales, is quoted in the Tearsheet article below:
BankMobile has launched a content marketing website called Paradigm Money to help customers navigate personal finance.
The site, which launched this month, includes news, opinion pieces, interviews and advice.
“We focus on the mindset of money,” said Ash Exantus, BankMobile’s director of financial education. “We wanted to create a site that was independent from the bank that’s not promoting our products or services, but as a place other people can go for financial news and financial literacy.”
The three-year-old digital bank is the latest financial upstarts to launch an online magazine, following Acorns and Santander; it wants to draw visibility to the human faces behind the company and in some cases, offer readers its own employees’ perspective on personal finance and topics in the news. For example, an op-ed by president and chief strategy officer Luvleen Sidhu argued why banks and fintech companies need to work together. The content doesn’t promote BankMobile’s products or attack big banks.
“A lot of times with fintech companies, you know the product, but you don’t know the people behind the product,” said Exantus.  “For us, this site is a way of showing our personalities.”
BankMobile, which was born as the mobile-only offshoot of Customers Bank which sold it last year, has 1.8 million customers to date and opens about 300,000 new accounts each year. It joins a legion of other financial brands with online content channels, including WealthsimpleJPMorgan Chase and Bank of America.
The company wouldn’t say how much it’s spending on Paradigm Money.
A four-person team in New York produces the site content, but Exantus suggested the bank plans to grow it, with a goal to put out daily content supplemented by regular features and opinion pieces — some of which could be written by freelancers and student writers, the bank’s target market. It’s also looking to grow video content and audio podcasts. Many of the articles are written by Sidhu and Exantus.
The company wouldn’t offer specifics on the marketing plan for Paradigm Money, but it indicated that digital ads will be part of the strategy, along with events that involve the university community it’s aiming to reach. Alongside Paradigm Money, the company will continue to post content relevant to customers on the BankMobile blog, Exantus said. The content marketing activities are an extension of BankMobile’s “customer for life” strategy — an approach to build a longer-term relationship with the customer.
“Their approach is more lead generation, like a softer sell … they’re trying to gain trust through engaging content and building a relationship with the audience,” said Andrew Gussman, vice president of U.S. sales for financial services ad platform Dianomi.
Exantus said the short-term objective of the site is to engage the audience rather than win new customers, but over longer-term, the company hopes to grow its customer based as a result of the relationships it’s built.
“From a long-term perspective, it’s an indirect way of creating that customer acquisition, but that’s not the intention,” he said. “We’re creating more content so we’re a trusted source for financial literacy.”

We sat down with Dianomi client, Piers Currie, who, until recently, served as the Group Head of Brand for Aberdeen Asset Management.
 
Under his leadership, Currie expanded marketing for Aberdeen into the U.S and several other markets. Currie shared with us the unique challenges of globalizing the investment brand and why marketing to investors is all about timing.
 
Why did you partner with Dianomi? 
Aberdeen Asset Management  has been working with Dianomi for more than a decade.  We started together in the U.K then expanded into the U.S. at the same time.  What appeals to us about Dianomi is that content is king and Dianomi enables us to distribute our content through multiple media platforms and to do it in a way that’s compelling and well reported.
 
Why is proximity important to Aberdeen Asset Management?

Asset management is a complex industry in terms of distribution. We’re in 25 countries and have 26 audience segments ranging from high institutional to private investors and we have to serve a community with diverse needs and expectations.  The U.S. specifically is very complex; both in terms of the channel and geography. Dianomi simplifies the process of reaching these audience segments in the U.S. and the U.K by being an end-to-end native platform. They help produce the content, develop the native ad and distribute it for us.  Being end-to-end is critical for us to scale. We’ve tripled the amount of content we produce but, at the same time, we need to make sure that what we put out there is compelling and resonates.

 
How does native advertising work within your marketing mix? 

How people interact with content is changing. We don’t own our customers so we must meet them in the environment where and how they want to read this information.  Investors also don’t often want to see banner ads from financial service providers and generally don’t transact much. They’re also pressed for time and prefer content in a snackable format.  Working with Dianomi, our content is time-efficient, interesting and dynamic.  We see engagement when the client and prospect is fertile. Using lead-gen tactics such as native, combined with email, we can move them through the funnel.

Ready or not, Google Chrome’s ad-blocker is going live on February 15.  For most publishers, this will come as no surprise. In fact, I would venture that many publishers are way ahead of Google in rethinking how to better balance their ad strategy with the user’s expectations and experience.
At Dianomi, we spend a lot of time thinking about the quid pro quo between the user and the publisher, and the principles behind the Coalition for Better Ads are the same tenants that we run our business by: the more value an ad brings to the reader, the more value an ad is to the publisher and brand.
There is little argument that native advertisements bring mutual value to the reader, brand and publisher, as numerous studies have found. For example, according to IPG Medialabs, consumers look at native ads 52 percent more frequently than banner ads.  Certainly, in light of the Chrome Ad Blocker, many publishers and brands are looking to native ads as an antidote to the dozen or so ads that will be blocked by Chrome and, more importantly, a way to reinvigorate trust and the value exchange with the reader.   
When done right, native ads bring value all around, to reader, brand and publisher. Take Dianomi client, Kiplinger, which last year reexamined its native ad strategy, reducing the number of content network partners from five to one: Dianomi.  Kiplinger focused on Dianomi because of relevancy and utility.
By putting more relevant content up and taking some of the others away, they found that more people were engaging with their native ad content. By focusing on content links from a single specialized source like Dianomi, Kiplinger is seeing not only better performance from third-party sponsored content but from ad performance overall. Specifically, a 10 percent increase in ad revenue.
Contextual relevance is one of the biggest drivers of performance in advertising.  As soon as you go out of a contextually relevant environment, conversions drop dramatically. Any publisher that is considering native as strategy to address the new ad standards, should take a step back and remember that a lack of relevancy is part of what drove the interruptive experiences now being blocked.  Only when you ad relevancy can you bring out the true value that native has to offer.

This article featured on adotas.com, to view the article on Adotas click here.

As Native advertising matures, performance is getting better. But what’s driving it? Native advertising now makes up 50 percent of digital ad spend and will be a $22 billion dollar market in 2017.  But what makes native advertising so successful? For a while now, all the credit has been given to the discrete unit and it’s adaptability with the form and function of the page.  But, while the unit does deserve a great deal of credit, the growth of native advertising is also being driven by other things.  Specifically,  the contextual relevance of the content inside drives its performance.  Data from Nielsen shows that contextual relevance directly correlates to performance; contextually relevant ads increase performance by 50 percent.

Context and native are not interchangeable terms.  A lot of native advertisements have little to no contextual relevance to the content they live with.  And, yet despite this lack of contextual relevance, they still outperform banner advertisements.  Context takes the native ad one step further: it fits with the content around it. For example, if you’re reading an article on 2017 cars on a car site and see a native ad directing you to Kelly Blue Book’s review of a 2018 Ford, that’s context.

Relevance, the ability of a native ad to further be targeted to the reader, is the peanut butter to context’s jelly. Individually, they positively impact performance, but combined they possess an opportunity to grow engagement.  A native ad becomes relevant when its content is timely and/or further targeted to that specific reader.  For example, on Bonnier’s Swedish news site, Expressen, readers recently spent an average of 55 seconds with a timely native article (one that corresponded with the news of the day), compared to 35 seconds with typical native content on the same site.

With these performance improvements, one would think that all advertisers who utilize native would also want to squeeze these gains from their buys. But, unfortunately, this is not always the case.  One of the reasons is that context and relevance, unlike native advertising itself, haven’t always been easy to scale, but this is all changing.

For example, in the past, to increase relevance, some marketers would work directly with a publisher’s content studio, and create the right content for that site’s own readers. This content lived and breathed only with that publishers ecosystem.  Great for relevance, bad for scale. However, smart publishers are building audiences for this content, driving traffic through native ad buys from other relevant publishers and even social.

Having access to publisher data, in aggregate, is also a boon to context and relevance. Specifically, knowing what topics are resonating in aggregate–across multiple properties–can help advertisers target readers much more efficiently.

Finally, targeting technologies have never been more mature and they’re only getting better.  Some native ad vendors allow for real-time targeting of individual users by combining several different data sets, including layering situational data on top of data from the advertiser’s DMP.  For example, native ads can now target specific users in specific locations with ads that consider time of day, weather, current events etc, adding to relevance.

As CMOs pour more and more money into native in 2018, they should jump in with eyes wide open.  As a whole, yes, the native unit performs better than display. But, can they do better than just the performance of the unit? Yes. Adding context, relevance and price transparency will help them get more out of native.

 
This week, journalist Steve Smith wrote a piece in Folio magazine explaining why Kiplinger have chosen dianomi as their sole content network partner. You can find the article written here.
Clutter happens. It’s one of the sad consequences of online ad economics. Publishers hungry for more digital dimes seem unable to resist slapping in another line of code and adding that next bright shiny ad network widget to squeeze a few more pennies of revenue per page. In recent years, the ubiquitous and nearly invisible banners and badges have been joined by so-called “native” sponsored content networks that only add to the mess. These boxes of paid headline link to other content and sponsors often promise contextually relevant information users appreciate. But they are just as often responsible for planting Kim Kardashian clickbait into the latest news from the Middle East or a retirement advice piece.
This is precisely the problem legendary financial advice brand Kiplinger.com found at its own site. “A year ago we were looking at our website and realized we have a lot of noise,” says business development manager, Phil Hawken.
Kiplinger was working with up to five redistribution partners as well as using an entry page interstitial that greeted newcomers with an ad. “While the ad had great visibility, it didn’t have great performance,” he admits. “It was a terrible user experience.”
Kiplinger also suspected that the clutter was not only eroding the user experience but overall revenue as well. More was not necessarily more.
The Kiplinger cleanup theorized that a cleaner U/X would also lead to better performance for the ads that users were now seeing. The site eliminated the opening interstitial unit and now only serves it for email sign ups.
“We still have site banner ads,” he says. “But we try to limit that to a number of key placements and talk more to the advertisers.” There is still a prominent leaderboard unit, but it actually performs well for Kiplinger. “A lot of users say they don’t click on banners. But our audience does skew older and are interested in personal finance. So when we run personal finance ads next to that content we see a bit of an uptick for advertisers.”
To be sure, Kiplinger enjoys the advantage of skewing older and still seeing more of its traffic coming from the desktop than many competitors. The mix is still 75 percent desktop, 18 percent mobile and 7 percent tablet. But the site is fully responsive, so the same new pared down ad experience moves to mobile as well. Kiplinger does still use some pop-ups on mobile because of the limited real estate and “ads don’t perform quite as well on phones in terms of clicks and engagement,” he says.
But the real lesson from the Kiplinger rethink was not only that relevance matters in ad performance, but irrelevant ad content negatively impacts overall ad effectiveness.
Kiplinger reduced the number of content network partners from five to one, settling on Dianomi, a native ad platform that specializes in financial content. The test, says Hawken, was “let’s see if we can feature the right links rather than even the ones that could make the most money. By putting more relevant content up and taking some of the others away, we found that more people were engaging with the content that was up there.” They did considerable A/B testing of different formats and link content to discover, “when we put [fewer] contextual links in the right places the performance was much better than having many things vying for attention.”
Relevance and utility are the winning combination for Kiplinger now. Widgets like mortgage comparison tools have proven especially engaging in visitors in the lead-to- sale process. By focusing on content links from a single specialized source like Dianomi, Kiplinger is seeing not only better performance from third party sponsored content but from ad performance overall. “We were up 10 percent in terms of the advertising side, and up 40% on the site partnership level,” he says.
The lesson here is that experience matters (user experience, that is). And it matters to more than responsiveness to the clutter on any single page. It matters to a user’s overall interaction with a media brand. That Kardashian clickbait may have an immediate CTR and CPM payoff, but that math is short sighted. The full equation calculates overall impact on ad receptiveness. “We found not only that our users didn’t have interest in irrelevant content links, but that it was a negative. It turned them off to engaging more in our site.”
View the redesigned site here.