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We’re expanding!

Dianomi is to host “Financial Services Marketing 2025” in Singapore on Thursday, 18 September 2025.

Last year’s event in Sydney was not only informative, but also very entertaining: we kept the sessions short, the coffee flowing and Chatham House rule in effect.

The one day event is for marketers of financial services and business, particularly those of investments, wealth management, private banking, stockbroking and associated services.

Once again we will have some very interesting and entertaining speakers on stage and a room full of experts in the audience so the presentations, questions and networking should be superb.

Current Dianomi APAC clients are invited to attend, please contact your Account Manager if you have not yet heard from us.

If you would like to present or be involved in a panel discussion then please let us know.

Recap video from 2024 event:

In today’s complex media landscape, where your brand’s ads show up, matters more than ever. Brands are constantly trying to balance two big goals: staying in brand-safe environments and connecting with the right audience. It’s not always an easy line to walk, and advertisers have recently become hesitant to place their ads on news content. However, by avoiding news content altogether, they could be missing out on great opportunities.

The key to brand-safe advertising is to focus on placing ads in trustworthy, high-quality news environments that attract relevant and engaged audiences.

Why Keyword Blocking Isn’t the Whole Answer

In an effort to shield their brands from potentially harmful content, many advertisers rely on keyword blocking – filtering out ads from appearing near certain topics. While this approach might seem like a safe bet, it often goes too far. Ads end up being blocked from valuable and relevant content, reducing opportunities for both advertisers and publishers.

In reality, a study by Stagwell, called the “Future of News”, found that there is no negative impact on brand safety when ads appear next to hard-hitting news topics like the US election or even war/conflict coverage. This finding challenges the common belief that serious news topics are automatically bad for brands. Overusing restrictions like keyword blocking could actually hurt brands more by shutting them out of places where their audience is already engaged.

Building Trust with Quality Journalism

Advertising on trusted new sites is about more than just visibility – it’s about credibility. Premium publishers are known for their strong fact-checking and high standards, offering readers content they can trust.

Compare that to platforms like Instagram and Facebook, where Meta recently announced they will no longer fact-check their content. When brands choose to appear on trustworthy news sites they align themselves with reliability and credibility, which can make a big difference in how they’re seen by consumers.

The data backs this up. A study by Newsworks found that people trust brands 1.5x more when those brands advertise on news websites compared to non-news sites. Ads in trusted environments not only protect your brand but also improve how people perceive and engage with it.

A Smarter Way Forward

Brand safety is, and will always be, a fundamental pillar of advertising, but avoiding quality news content isn’t the answer. Instead, brands should explore smarter strategies like contextual advertising. This approach places ads alongside relevant, premium content where audiences are already engaged.

With Dianomi, brands can tap into contextual advertising to position their messages within high-quality articles that matter to their target audience. It’s a win-win: brands enhance their credibility, and audiences see ads that feel relevant and trustworthy.

Conclusion

Brand safety isn’t about steering clear of the news – it’s about being thoughtful about where your ads appear. Trusted news environments offer a unique chance to boost credibility and connect with audiences in meaningful ways. By leveraging tools like contextual advertising, brads can create campaigns that build trust, improve engagement, and still reach the audiences that matter most.

Did you know that, according to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), 21% of ad impressions come from websites designed solely to generate ad revenue? These Made for Advertising (MFA) sites not only waste marketing budgets but also jeopardize brand reputation and contribute significantly to environmental harm.

For advertisers striving to protect their reputation and ensure effective campaigns, controlling ad placements is more crucial-and challenging-than ever. The rise of MFA websites and the complexities of modern media buying processes are creating low-value environments that undermine campaign goals.

What Are MFA Websites?

MFA websites exist solely to drive ad revenue. They’re characterized by clickbait headlines, intrusive ads, and a poor user experience. Instead of engaging audiences with meaningful content, these sites prioritize sheer ad volume, creating two significant risks for advertisers:

• Ineffective Campaigns: Ads on MFA sites rarely achieve their intended goals. With low-quality, low-value inventory, advertisers waste budgets on impressions that don’t engage the right audience or deliver desired results.
• Environmental Impact: MFA sites generate excessive programmatic activity, leading to higher carbon emissions. According to Scope3, these sites produce 26% more carbon emissions compared to non-MFA inventory, due to the sheer volume of ads and ad calls they generate.

The consequences of supporting MFA sites go beyond wasted budgets-they harm both brand reputation and the planet.

The Complexity of Media Buying

Modern programmatic platforms have transformed advertising by automating the buying process. But this convenience can lead to unintended consequences: lack of visibility and control. Without full visibility, ads often end up on MFA sites, compromising campaign brand safety and campaign effectiveness.

This issue is further compounded by pressures within the advertising ecosystem. To meet performance targets-often narrowly defined as clicks, impressions, or other metrics that fail to account for audience quality, relevance, or genuine attention-agencies and ad tech vendors may opt for cheaper, low-quality options, even when they don’t align with the brand’s broader goals. This narrow pursuit of cost efficiency and surface-level performance can lead to ads appearing in unsuitable environments, ultimately damaging the brand’s reputation.

Imagine a high-end fashion brand’s ad appearing on a cluttered clickbait site. Not only does it fail to connect with the intended audience, but it also risks eroding the brand’s perceived value.

Many advertisers are unaware of where their ads are being placed, making it difficult to ensure that their campaigns are running in high-quality, brand-safe environments.

Prioritizing Quality and Context

In today’s landscape, advertisers must take a proactive approach to media buying. By prioritizing transparency, quality, and alignment with brand values, you can protect your reputation and drive meaningful engagement. Here are three key steps to consider:

1. Audit Media Buys: Regularly review where your ads are appearing to ensure alignment with your brand’s values and objectives.
2. Leverage Transparent Tools: Use platforms that offer full visibility into ad placements, empowering you to avoid low-quality inventory.
3. Invest in Premium Publishers: Choose high-quality publishers that offer controlled, brand-safe advertising environments. Through this may come at a higher upfront cost, it leads to stronger audience connections and better ROI.

For example, an ad placed on a reputable financial news platform is more likely to resonate with its intended audience that one buried on an MFA site filled with intrusive pop-ups.

How Dianomi Helps

Platforms like Dianomi specialize in delivering ads within premium, brand-safe environments. By focusing on quality placements, Dianomi ensures your message reaches the right audience in the right context.

By partnering with a platform that prioritizes transparency and high-value inventory, advertisers can confidently avoid the pitfalls of MFA sites and instead prioritize what truly matters: delivering impactful campaigns.

Conclusion

The growing presence of MFA websites and the complexities of media buying make it more important than ever for advertisers to take control of their campaigns. By prioritizing quality, context, and transparency, you can safeguard your brand’s reputation and drive better results.

With the right strategies and tools, such as those offered by Dianomi, you can focus on what truly matters: delivering impactful advertising that connects with your audience in the right context.

The anticipated demise of third-party cookies has been one of the most talked-about topics in the advertising industry over the past several years. Google’s recent reversal of its plan to block third-party cookies on Chrome has prompted many marketers to rethink their strategies. Despite Google’s decision, here’s why it’s smart for marketers to embrace cookieless targeting anyway.

Why Now?

The threat of third-party cookies vanishing has not gone away entirely. Google may still present users with the option to decline cookie targeting, and the likelihood is that many will choose to opt-out. With the future of cookies remaining uncertain, it’s essential for marketers to be prepared. In fact, a significant portion of the market is already cookieless: Safari deprecated third-party tracking back in 2017 and Firefox followed in 2019 by blocking third-party cookies by default. Additionally, according to a May 2023 survey from the Pew Research Center, 67% of US adults turn off cookies or website tracking to protect their privacy. Fortunately, cookieless strategies already deliver performance on par with, or even better than, cookie-based approaches. Now is the time to explore and embrace these alternatives to future-proof your marketing efforts.

The Power of Cookieless Targeting

Cookieless targeting offers an effective alternative to traditional cookie-based strategies by focusing on the context of the content rather than tracking individual users. Contextual targeting delivers ads based on the relevance of the webpage’s content, making it highly aligned with user intent in real-time.

This approach often outperforms cookie-based targeting because it places ads in environments where audiences are already engaged with related topics, increasing the chances of meaningful interactions. A user reading an article about the upcoming tax season might see ads for tax or financial planning, which will likely resonate with them more than a randomly targeted ad. It will also drive better ad recall because the ad is related to the content being viewed.

Since contextual targeting serves ads relevant to the content a user is viewing, it avoids the issue of over-targeting users and creating ad fatigue. It creates a more organic user experience. Users are less likely to feel “chased” by ads, as they won’t see repetitive ads based on tracking.

Machine learning further enhances the effectiveness of contextual targeting, allowing marketers to scale these strategies, reaching new audiences across brand-safe, premium publishers.

Establishing Trust

One of the key benefits of cookieless targeting is that it fosters greater trust and transparency between advertisers and consumers, ultimately leading to more meaningful and effective marketing. When consumers are not constantly retargeted, they will naturally feel at greater ease on content sites that feel more relevant to the current environment and not to past browsing activities. By avoiding personal data collection and tracking, it also eliminates consumer’s concerns over privacy invasion, thus creating a more respectful and ethical advertising ecosystem.

How to Make the Shift

Although this shift can seem daunting, it opens the door to innovation and enhanced audience engagement. By embracing new targeting methods, like Dianomi’s Audience Cohorts, marketers can achieve greater success connecting their brand with their desired consumers without relying on cookies. Reach out to us to learn how we can assist you in transitioning to a cookieless future and unlocking the full potential of digital marketing.

Our CEO, Rupert Hodson, joined ECI Partners on the latest episode of their ‘Building Successful Businesses’ podcast series. Rupert gives insight into Dianomi’s journey from a start-up to a business operating across three continents, and what he’s learned along the way. Rupert also touches on how the advertising and financial services industry is evolving, and how Dianomi is supporting that change.

Listen to the full episode here:

On March 23rd, Dianomi Sr. Partnerships Director, Justin Proctor, participated in a panel during the Gramercy Financial Marketers Forum 2022: Strategic Excellence in Financial Marketing in New York. The event was sponsored by Dianomi and the panel was focused on Financial Media Strategies for Success.

The panel included Louis Cohen, Director, Digital Marketing & Demand Generation Leader, EY; Elizabeth Coleman-Chen, Exec. Director, Head, Strategic Content Mktg, Alt. & Sustainable Investing, Morgan Stanley Investment Management; Meg Sullivan, Managing Director, Imprint.

After discussing what media strategies the panelists thought would be prominent in the future, Proctor explained the idea that a brand’s overall media strategy is similar to a bell curve. A brand’s role is to find their place on the curve in relation to their customer’s intent and interaction with their brand to create a perfect medium of client interest, media focus and brand differentiation in that space.

Originally posted on Brand Innovators

by Shane Schick

February 24, 2022

When Rupert Hodson uses the phrase “content recommendation platforms,” he knows that many people in the marketing community will instantly associate it with the sensationalistic or clickbait-style headlines that appear beneath articles on their favorite websites. 

He also knows that, as soon as anyone takes a closer look at Dianomi, they’ll realize how differently his company has approached this space. 

Headquartered in the United Kingdom, Dianomi has spent nearly 20 years helping brands place native ads with the ideal publishers to reach their target audience. Unlike Taboola, Outbrain or many similar content recommendation platforms, however, Dianomi has remained exclusively centered around publishers serving the business and finance sectors. 

By contextually targeting ads to professionals engaging with the finance vertical, Dianomi has been able to grow dramatically since its 2010 expansion into the U.S., which now accounts for 80% of its business. According to Hodson, its co-founder and CEO, Dianomi’s clientele includes seven of the top 10 global asset managers and six of the top 10 US banks.

Dianomi’s network, meanwhile, now spans more than 350 publishers, which offers brands access to digital channels that include web sites but also mobile apps and publishers Apple News channels. 

“The fact that we sit across all these publishers, and because we have fixed positions, we’re not competing with other sorts of demand sources,” Hodson told Brand Innovators, adding that Dianomi ensures the right experience by turning down the vast majority of advertisers that come its way because they’re not the right fit. “For an advertiser, if you’re a big US Bank, you can’t afford for your ad to appear next door to gut cleansing ads. That’s just a no-go.” Trust,Transparency and Brand safety have always been front and center of everything we do for both our advertisers and publishers

Last Spring, Dianomi completed its IPO, the first of U.K. and Ireland growth investor BGF’s portfolio companies to do so. The next step, according to Hodson, is a move into categories that interest the same high-income earners, but in their off hours. 

“We had publishers who said, ‘We love what you’re doing on monetizing our financial content, but we also have lifestyle content. Can you help us there?” he said, giving travel-oriented credit cards aimed at affluent readers who are engaging with travel content as an example. “Premium lifestyle advertisers are an exciting growth opportunity for us but again, it’s super important that we remain laser focused on creating a premium advertising environment for both our advertisers and publishers. We see automotive, travel, health and the premium end of the direct to consumer marketplace as key areas of focus.

Hodson shared some additional insights on content recommendation, native advertising and how Dianomi continues to differentiate itself: 

‘Performance Marketing’ Is Best Defined Through A Brand’s Unique KPIs

Dianomi works with plenty of advertisers who are trying to achieve conversions, but this can mean different things depending on the brand in question. Some might be looking for a click through to their website where the reader can engage with their content, but others want people to sign up for a newsletter, download an app,  sign up for an account or apply for a credit card, etc. Transparency on conversion has been a core driver of our ability to work with brands on an always on basis, as is our ability to optimize activity to conversion on a publisher by publisher basis.  

“In many ways, we work like a lab with our clients, sharing the learnings and optimizing the campaigns together and it’s very synergistic. Consequently, many of our advertisers are always-on, bidding to the efficient frontier, because there is really no reason to come off the platform if they are hitting their KPIs.

Even as much of the ad industry is trying to grasp the impact of Google’s recent decision to replace cookies with Topics, Hodson said that Dianomi, having focused on contextual targeting in its purest form since inception, as well as contextual lookalike targeting, is future proofed and well positioned to capture the opportunity that the depreciation of cookies is opening up. 

“We see time and time again that contextual targeting capabilities out perform behavioral targeting, with the latter being what the programmatic advertising ecosystem relies on. The trick is delivering contextual at scale. This is one of our core USPs.”

There Is Still Plenty Of Room For Creativity In Native Ad Experiences

Last year, Dianomi launched what Hodson called “streaming podcasts.” Readers can click “play” directly on a native ad unit and become listeners to the podcast. It’s a good case in point in how native ad creative will continue to evolve in order to provide a better user experience, Hodson said.

“I don’t quite like the phrase ‘snackable content,’ but it is that sort of approach where they’re trying to ensure that you keep that engagement,” he said. 

Marketers should work with companies like Dianomi as a sort of lab partner, he suggested, where its algorithm and team can help test variations on a campaign to maximize results. This can lead to some unexpected strategic moves; Hodson recalled one asset manager client which ended up using data it gathered through digital advertising with Dianomi on a nationwide  billboard campaign in the UK. 

Analytics Can Only Help When You Make The Effort To Produce Excellence

With 18 million articles a month running across its network of publishers, Dianomi has developed sophisticated capabilities in terms of guiding marketers to the best placement opportunities. This includes the ability to show data on content that is trending well or identifying “white spaces” that show where audiences are waiting to be provided new or different content. 

That said, Hodson pointed out that native ads need to adhere to what are considered premium best practices. Depending on their goals, for instance, some evergreen content might perform well over a longer period, while other content should be more timely. Information needs to be “digestible” for busy audiences with low attention spans. And of course, native ads have to provide genuine value.

“Our targeting will help,” he said, “but ultimately it’s reliant on  the brand producing high quality content that generates interest. That content can be in the form of written articles, infographics, videos or podcasts. It takes us back to the basics of successful advertising: delivering high quality advertising – why we focus on premium brands, into professionally curated and relevant content – our premium publisher partners, in a privacy friendly manner – targeting through context, not user data. And this is all done through our reach to over 440 million unique devices on a monthly basis.”

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

On April 27th, 2021 Rachel Tuffney spoke with MassMututal’s Kristin Lane, VP and Head of Consumer Activation & Engagement, in the Brand Innovators Consumer Engagement Summit. 

In their conversation, they focused on how MassMutual has pivoted successfully to a work-from-home environment and the different partnerships that MassMutual leverages to build and engage with their community.

 Click the image above to watch the full livecast and discover more content on the Brand Innovators website.