Dianomi has been awarded two Gramercy Institute Content Marketing Awards for its work with Global Atlantic Financial Group and the Financial Times.


For Global Atlantic Financial Group, Gramercy recognized its Downturn Defense campaign as the best Retirement Services campaign. Downturn Defense targeted financial advisors, across Dianomi’s network, with ads directing them to a white paper and series of videos about protecting clients retirement from market volatility.


For the Financial Times, the two companies were recognized for the publisher’s use of Dianomi’s Automated Ad technology to help grow the FT subscriber base. Using Automated Ads, the FT increased the frequency of ad creation by enabling a robot to do this work and to make the ads customized to each region: Dianomi automatically identified which stories were more likely to be of interest in each country. By reaching users at peak interest in world financial events, Dianomi delivered more qualified traffic that resulted in an increase in the number of subscribers to the Financial Times.


Congratulations to Global Atlantic and Financial Times for this achievement.

We are excited to announce that Dianomi is ranked #82 in the 18th annual “The Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100,” up thirteen spots from #95 in 2017. The Sunday Times made the announcement in yesterday’s weekend Business section.
It has been an exciting year for all of us at Dianomi. We have grown the team, customers and products. Earlier this year, we welcomed strategic investment from British Growth Fund (BGF). We also launched an Automated Ad Creation product, expanded into Germany and Canada (the latter through our partnership with The Globe and Mail), grew our publisher network to more than 350, and nabbed two Gramercy Financial Content Marketing Awards.
We’d like to thank everyone: clients, publishing partners, team and friends who helps make Dianomi a success. You can read more about the The Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100 here.

It has been estimated that millennials will inherit $30 trillion from their baby boomer parents, in a phenomenon being called: “the great wealth transfer.” However, how millennials will handle this takeover is the unanswered question that this industry is asking. Millennials have been slower than boomers to embrace investment products, have been said to have a weaker grasp of what financial advisors do, and lack trust in banks and financial institutions.


If you’re a marketer in financial services, that $30 trillion figure is certainly quite alluring. But, to win a share of it, financial marketers must first address the behaviors and sentiment changes in their marketing or risk their messaging falling upon deaf ears. Here’s what you need to know about targeting this group:

Not as unusual as you may think: Millennials may seem very unique to financial services companies, but their behaviors are actually closely aligned with middle-aged investors (Gen X). Neither group is as prolific as boomers, who are much more engaged in financial services products and news, across the board, and more likely to interact with an ad or financial content. According to our data, boomers generally expressed more interest (usually 40% or more) in financial services product than any other investor group.


Millennials are interested in the basics: Our data found that millennials are not actually disengaged in finance. Rather, in some cases, millennials are more engaged than Gen Xers or almost as engaged with them. For example, millennials demonstrated intent in basic financial products, such as bank accounts and credit cards. Specifically with regard to bank accounts, millennials are about 14% more interested than Gen Xers. Millennials are also almost equally interested in credit cards as Gen Xers.


Not thinking too far ahead: Some millennials are thinking about their future in terms of mortgages and IRAs but demonstrate product interest that is far behind baby boomers and slightly behind GenXers. Our data shows that millennials are half as interested in IRAs and mortgages compared to boomers.


Financial services need to build trust: Millennials are half as interested in financial advice products than baby boomers and less interested generally in financial planning products, validating a recent Deloitte study that found that: “Millennials have a negative perception of financial planners,” and the need to overcome this with pricing transparency.


Socially Aware: Millennials are known for prioritizing happiness and work-life balance. Although they may earn less money, or have higher debt related to student loans, millennials are almost equally interested in charity than Boomers and Gen Xers. They also demonstrate a higher interest in newer types of investments such as marijuana and crypto than they do with many more traditional investments.

Find out more

[advertiserForm]

Brian Batenburg is Programmatic Sales Manager at The Globe and Mail and oversees the media company’s direct response and performance strategy. He recently sat down with Dianomi to discuss the publisher’s native ad strategy, the importance of trust and how native can be used to complement existing content.


Tell us about The Globe and Mail.
The Globe and Mail is Canada’s leading media company, sparking national conversations and spurring policy changes through brave and independent journalism, a path we’ve followed since 1844. With our award-winning coverage of business, politics and national affairs, we reach 6.5 million readers every week through our print and digital formats, with Report on Business magazine reaching 1.6 million readers in print and digital every issue.


What is the mandate of the organization both in respect to your readers and advertisers and what is its vision for the future?
To inspire and inform Canadians through courageous, empathetic and objective journalism. We aim to be a customer-focused organization by putting the needs of our readers first. The Globe and Mail delivers a superior experience to our audience, based on responsible, sustainable business practices, and independent ownership.
This mentality is present throughout the organization, including the Revenue department: servicing our advertisers with responsible, sustainable business practices. We are accountable and transparent, which is increasingly important in today’s marketing climate. These practices also extend to our exclusive Canadian representation agreements with top-tier global brands as part of the Globe Alliance.


What is your role? What’s top of your mind day-to-day?
Titles aside, my role in the organization is to bring the best value we can to our advertisers based on their goals and objectives. This is done through a group of experts that make up a team called Globe Response. This specialty team focuses entirely on results-based marketing, using a combination of industry-leading tools and in-house technology and data to deliver highly efficient performance results. We focus on looking beyond an impression or click, for us it’s about understanding how our audience and platform can deliver on our client’s campaign objectives and KPIs.
Each day, our team looks to uncover insights and strategies that can help enhance and deliver solutions our audience is seeking, linking them with best practices and experiences. Working in a crowded marketplace, we are always thinking of ways to provide advertisers with effective, brand-safe solutions aligned to their business goals.


You recently partnered with Dianomi to roll out their units on The Globe and Mail’s site and to act as the sales representative for Dianomi in Canada. What excites you about native advertising and Dianomi?
Our Dianomi partnership brings a vast extended network to our leading suite of finance and business reach in Canada. The team has carefully curated relationships with publishers that have highly sought-after financial and business news and opinions consumed by Canadians in their everyday digital consumption. By placing native posts within these contextually relevant environments, Dianomi’s suite connects useful insights that supply value to our readers. Our readers, in turn, trust the Dianomi widget and see the content and offers that surface as valuable and relevant.
The Globe is excited to be the first Canadian publisher to onboard Dianomi. Given our focus and leadership in the business and finance category, it’s an effective tool in delivering client KPIs – both as a stand-alone solution or part of a larger integration or custom solution.


What is the importance of native advertising to The Globe and Mail?
The Globe and Mail has offered native advertising in various formats for some time. Our strategy of being transparent about Sponsor Content placements has served us well in creating trust with users while meeting the needs of our advertising partners. Adding Dianomi to the platform was a logical next step that allows us to take users to an advertiser’s site, transparently, through “Paid Post” messaging. Using a native platform on Globe properties allows an advertiser to experience a qualified audience as the ad content is specifically placed at the end or alongside articles. This native placement is a complement to the content, and allows readers to continue consuming what is most relevant to them. In-line with the Dianomi model, this feature focuses specifically on our business and investing pages to ensure high value to the user. Offering a native platform allows us to better share ideas around products, offerings, and services in an unobtrusive manner, with a format that users want to interact with at the right time.


How can publishers and brands strategically use native advertising? What can they expect from native (e.g. drive traffic new revenue stream, etc.)
Native is a great tool and can be put to work in several ways. It can leverage messaging to build awareness and familiarity with the audience, or it can be tactically implemented to drive an outcome. Overall it is an effective way to engage with potential customers using an informative approach.
At the Globe, we use native in 2 ways:


1. A full-service Sponsor Content experience (developed in partnership with advertisers and produced by our in-house Content Studio), and

2. Client-hosted content, contextually placed within our publishing environment and labelled as a Paid Post.
Dianomi is a great example of No. 2, especially where we have the ability to surface financial and business related offers, information, and content to an audience already contextually invested in this stream to provide further value. We have been able to help advertisers outside of traditional display with events, ticket sales, content promotion, and other unique offerings. The Dianomi platform allows for us to evaluate creative variations, make real-time optimizations with placements, and others – all feedback the advertiser can use to see best performance and optimize future opportunities. The Dianomi platform not only provides us with an alternate revenue stream, it adds to our ability to provide optimized product for our advertisers and an alternative for our readers to engage with content.

The old saying goes, “in life there are no guarantees.” And yet, for a moment in time, it would appear that some vendors in the content marketing space defied that logic by reportedly offering revenue guarantees to publishers in the ballpark of a $1million+. But, as Digiday reported earlier in the year, some publishers are starting to see these guarantees disappear with negotiations proposing a pure rev-share model instead.
At first glance the move from a minimum guarantee to a performance model might seem like a bad thing, publishers playing the long game know that it’s not. Minimum guarantees have not been without their downsides for publishers. In return for the minimum guarantee, publishers had to deliver a minimum number of pageviews and exclude other ad providers. This meant, running “unsightly widgets” on all or most of their pages.
Of these widgets, A New York Times’s article in Oct 2016 stated that: “some publishers are wondering about the effect these so-called content ads may be having on their brands and readers. Among the reasons: The links can lead to questionable websites, run by unknown entities. Sometimes the information they present is false.” Others complained that “it’s not the right look” if you’re trying to present yourself as a “high-quality, upper tier website.”
At Dianomi, we agree with this sentiment. As a publisher who works with 350+ plus tier one publishers, we know that context and brand safety have a positive effect on ROI. A recent study from Inskin Media found that being on a site that has a strong publisher branding “helped boost effectiveness, whereas being served against potentially damaging editorial content had less of an effect.”
Publishers who are shifting from a guarantee to a rev-share model based on CPC should be using the negotiations as an opportunity to rethink their overall content marketing strategy. For premium publishers specifically, this may very likely mean testing your current partner against a new partner, seeing how each performs and evaluating those partners for other qualities like link quality, brand safety and context.
Publishers should also consider and qualify the long-term effect that poor quality links will have on their revenues and relationship with the reader. From Fortune: “If you just published a long investigative piece of journalism on an important topic like immigration or the U.S. political landscape, what message does it send when the reader gets to the bottom of that story and sees links to cheesy sites using photos of scantily-clad women and other gimmicks?”
We’d love to know the answer to that question.

The Globe and Mail is the first publisher in Canada to deploy Dianomi’s native ad units.
Dianomi, a native content and marketing platform, today announced its expansion into the Canadian market through a partnership with The Globe and Mail. The Globe and Mail is the first publisher in Canada to offer Dianomi’s native ad units to the financial community and is the exclusive sales representative of Dianomi in the Canadian market.
“Dianomi is helping us expand our native offering to meet the growing demand from our financial advertisers,” said Brian Batenburg, programmatic sales manager at The Globe and Mail. “After testing the Dianomi platform, we’ve seen significant impact in performance and driving audience engagement for our advertisers.”
Dianomi’s native ad units are used by over 350 premium publishers globally, including Marketwatch, Reuters, The Street, Kiplinger and Business Insider. Business and finance advertisers on The Globe and Mail will be able to reach readers with contextually relevant native content–at scale–and leverage Dianomi strategically in combination with The Globe and Mail’s own custom ad placements.
The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) estimated online advertising revenue in Canada would increase 13 percent to $6.2 billion in 2017.
“We’re excited to have The Globe and Mail represent the Dianomi platform in Canada,” said Rupert Hodson, CEO of Dianomi. “As a premium client, The Globe understands the power of Dianomi to increase revenue by providing native ad units that are relevant to audiences and in a brand-safe environment.”