Category: News

Dianomi’s Cabell De Marcellus sat down with Jill Malandrino of Nasdaq to talk about how native advertising can add value to financial services advertisers and the benefits of content intelligence in native advertising. “Last month we did 5.1 billion ad impressions,” said Marcellus. “We had 3.9 million people reading about ETFs. We will look at the themes in ETFs that are most popular and say to the advertiser, these are the trending topics that you may want to write about.”
To see the interview click here. 

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.

This year, the FCS (Financial Communications Society) will be focusing their first Education summit on the upheaval of Digital Advertising.

The Summit will feature talks and presentations given by some of the industries leading partners, including Dianomi’s Co-founder and CTO Cabell de Marcellous.  The topics Cabell will be covering range from data & measurement to transparency in the marketplace.

For more information about the Summit please visit https://thefcs.org/events/digital-advertising/

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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.
 

dianomi is pleased to announce that it has ranked no.13 in the Sunday Times SME Export track 100.
 
The Sunday Times Lloyds SME Export Track 100 ranks Britain’s 100 small and medium-sized (SME) companies with the fastest-growing international sales over the latest two years. It is compiled by Fast Track and published in The Sunday Times each February.
 
Find out more here.

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.