Guest: Gordon Borrell, Borrell Associates

“If we don’t understand that the people who really support the newspaper are the advertisers, and they need to be able to use the newspaper company to help them sell things, to help them grow their business, if we fumble that, we don’t have a newspaper.”

– Gordon Borrell, Borrell Associates

In an environment with ever-increasing advertising options, what do local advertisers want today? As everything becomes more digital, what changes are happening across media, and what are the opportunities for local news publishers to stand out? What do marketers uniquely value about local news media and how can publishers capitalize on that? 

News/Media Alliance President & CEO David Chavern dives into these questions and more in this episode of News Take with Gordon Borrell, founder of advertising tracking firm, Borrell Associates. In this candid conversation, Borrell shares his insights on the evolving world of local advertising and what advertisers are looking for specifically from local news publishers, as well as how publishers can be more valuable by serving as advisors to advertisers on how to tell their story.

Listen or download the audio file to listen offline:

Don’t forget to subscribe to the News Take podcast by clicking “Follow” and selecting your preferred podcasting platform, or click on your preferred platform: Spotify, Apple, Google.

Watch with video:

Speaker bios

Gordon Borrell founded Borrell Associates in 2001 and has become the local media industry’s leading analyst. He is ranked in the top 2 percent among Gerson Lehrman Group’s 150,000 consultants worldwide and is quoted in Ad Age, MediaPost, Editor & Publisher, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes and other publications. Prior to starting Borrell Associates, Gordon was vice president for new media for Landmark Communications, where he started his career 22 years earlier as a newspaper reporter. He is past chairman of the Local Media Association and of the Local Media Foundation. Gordon has five children and lives with his wife, a writer and book author, in Hampton Roads, Va.

Related viewing

Episode 39: Why Newspaper Advertisers Keep Buying

Watch the next episode: Update on News Deserts and Local News Trends

Watch the previous episode: Print, Logistics and Delivery in a Transitional Age

View all episodes

Send us your suggestions

Send your suggestions for future News Take guests to Alliance VP, Research & Insights Rebecca Frank at rebecca@newsmediaalliance.org.

Back to top

The post News Take Episode 109: The State of Advertising and Local News appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

Native advertising in news has been controversial for some time. However, given changes in the business model and underlying conditions for news, more organizations have evolved their perspective on the practice. Recent research delves deep into global publishers’ perceptions and behaviors related to native advertising. In “Native Advertising Trends 2018 – The News Media,” the Native Advertising Institute and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) surveyed nearly 150 executives around the world to see how native advertising fits into their strategies and financial planning.

Overall, the report finds that native advertising continues to grow in importance. It is on an upward trend as a source of revenue for news organizations. Many publishers are investing in meeting their advertisers’ needs to reflect that financial value by creating brand studios and other native advertising support structures. Publishers project that in 2021, native advertising will comprise 36 percent of advertising revenue, with 82 percent of respondents anticipating the revenues from native advertising will grow in 2019.

Native advertising continues to provide high value for publishers and advertisers alike, leading to important internal decisions about organization structure. Twenty-nine percent of publishers interviewed say they are creating a standalone team to develop native advertising content. Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) sell native advertising solutions in combination with traditional advertising. Less than one-quarter have a dedicated native advertising sales team.

As native advertising continues to bring more value, publishers are feeling the need to evolve their sales offering. Thirty-nine percent of survey respondents felt the biggest challenge to native advertising was training their sales team, with “poor client understanding” seen as the biggest threat to its success. However, as native advertising evolves, and publishers become more comfortable with rules and internal structures (particularly around clear labeling of native advertising), these concerns may dissipate and allow native advertising to continue to grow. For publishers seeking new sources of revenue, native advertising could potentially be a valuable tool.

The full report is available to WAN-IFRA members at no charge (non-members can purchase the report for a fee) on WAN-IFRA’s website.

The post New Report: Native Advertising Continues to Provide Value for Publishers and Advertisers appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

While native might not be your biggest product right now, or even a part of your advertising plan, there’s still a lot you can learn from how BuzzFeed does business.

BuzzFeed produces some of the most viral native advertising, and their sponsored content is seamlessly integrated with their editorial content. That’s in part because native advertising was the first product BuzzFeed offered to advertisers, so it’s been a part of their content mix since day one.

“Native ads are our bread and butter,” says Inés Pacheco, BuzzFeed’s director of business operations.

Pacheco notes that when native advertising first came along, many publishers were throwing it in as a freebie when advertisers purchased a bigger display package. While in some cases, Pacheco says, that can devalue your native ads, it’s a fantastic way to slowly add the option into your product mix.

You can also treat native ads like display ads, at least in terms of pricing, at the beginning. “It’s a great way to start to collect data on your views (per piece of native content) and your audience,” she says. “What a view looks like for you will be different from what a view looks like for BuzzFeed. Your view might be more expensive depending on your audience.”

As an initial offering, Pacheco suggests giving advertisers two native posts (an entry-level package at BuzzFeed), because that will allow you to find an audience across content and platforms. This is something that will not only benefit advertisers, but will give you more data on how your audience interacts with native content, so that you can start figuring out how to price native-only ad offerings down the line.

If you don’t want to give away ad space for free, Pacheco says you can price native ads the same way you would price display ads to get things off the ground. And for that, there are numerous pricing options. You can go with a cost-per-view (CPV) or a cost-per-day (CPD) model, or you can use a cost-per-thousand (CPM) impressions model.

“When we first moved to a cost-per-view model, we looked at a year’s worth of [CPM data] to see how these programs had performed in the past,” Pacheco explains.

You don’t need to rush into changing your pricing model, and it may be more worthwhile to build up your available data instead of going straight for increased revenue. Even after all these years, BuzzFeed is constantly refining their pricing — and content — based on actual performance. You don’t need to have the perfect plan in place overnight.

Once your team is more comfortable with native content and you’ve collected the data you need to prove your reach, you might find yourself increasing your CPV, CPD or CPM prices. You’ll also want to set a base price per package to make sure you’re offsetting the costs of actually creating the native content in-house. How you price that can be flexible depending on the content and the advertiser.
For example, you may want to offer a lower base price and a higher CPD, or vice versa. You’ll want to find what works not only for you, but for your advertisers. You also need to take into account the value of your social channels when considering what price you set, Pacheco says. Native isn’t a one-size-fits-all advertising option, so it’s up to both sides of the arrangement to be willing to bend a bit to ensure the best fit.

The creative side is also something that you’ll need to evolve over time as you get more settled into offering native ads. There’s always a push-pull with advertisers, Pacheco says, and it will be up to your creative team to find the right balance of branding and content so that the ads attract readers and viewers and keep them hooked. That information, too, will require you to collect data from early native partnerships.

A large-scale native operation like BuzzFeed is able to offer cross-platform content and packages that include a mix of native pieces, from social videos to quizzes to sponsored articles, and they’re able to promote it across their own social media channels, each of which has millions of followers. But just because you don’t have the same reach doesn’t mean you can’t provide your advertisers an equally worthwhile native advertising package. The data you gather from early experiments with the medium will help you not only attract new advertisers, but also will guide you as to what pricing model and content mixture works best for your audience.

Are you offering branded content to your advertisers? Are you considering adding it to the mix? We want to hear about it! You can tell us what you’re doing with native advertising by emailing jennifer@newsmediaalliance.org or tweeting @EditrixJen. We’d also love to know what else you’d like to learn in 2018, whether you’re on the business or creative side of the news media business.

The post How To: Price Your Native Advertising Offerings appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

Surprisingly, perhaps, what I don’t hate is native advertising. There’s something unobtrusive about an ad that comes across as content. (Disclaimer: I used to write sponsored content for Task & Purpose.) It doesn’t hurt that native advertising has become more like the content I look for. From BuzzFeed, I can expect branded quizzes (and I always take their quizzes, try as I might to deny it), while The Washington Post and others give me smart sponsored content that, yes, tries to sell me something, but also makes me think.

The “advertorial” is one of the most popular and effective means of attracting customers through sponsored content. Because sponsored content mirrors the look and feel of the publication, it doesn’t come across as a direct advertisement. That means that sponsored content wins out because of the quality of the content, as well as the relevance to readers and the entertainment or information value that it includes. Besides, according to a 2016 report from Nielsen, consumers had more recall of and affinity for brands and products shown in sponsored content than in such things as pre-roll advertisements.

News publishers are the go-to for quality branded material. But big national publishers aren’t the only ones who can benefit from branded content. If you have a print or online publication, the current backlash against obtrusive ads and the increased spending on native advertising means you have an opportunity to grow your reach and revenue by offering branded content.

So, how can your publication get into the branded content business?

1) Leverage your reliability as a news producer. As Annie Granatstein, head of The Washington Post’s BrandStudio, notes, people come to her for branded content precisely because they know the power of the Post’s journalism. By partnering with a trusted news source, advertisers are ensuring that their ad is trusted, too.

“As more advertising dollars move into native, publishers have an opportunity to generate more revenue by creating branded content,” Granatstein says.

“Additionally, there is a reputational benefit. If the custom studio creates award-winning content, it enhances the reputation of the publisher’s brand and increases the value of advertising with that publisher,” she continues. “We call this ‘tip of the spear’: having a respected custom content studio increases other ad revenue.”

2) Show up to the table with realistic expectations. As the director of communications for JamesAllen.com, a digital jewelry retailer, Shannon Delany has helped create some truly viral branded content, but she knows going in that she has to rely on not only her own ideas, but the expertise of the content partners she’s working with.

“We come to our partners with briefs that outline our audience and the goals of the piece of content that we’re looking to create. When it’s a sponsored post, we also share key talking points. Then we put the ball in the court of the content creator,” Delany explains. “They know their audience and it’s about striking that balance between getting our message across and doing it in a way that makes sense for their audience, fitting in seamlessly with all of the other content that they create.”

On the other side of the equation, Granatstein says that publishers need to come to the table prepared, as if they’re presenting a news story to their editor.

“We take an intense story-first approach, which is core to The Washington Post’s DNA, conducting deep journalistic investigation to find the fresh angles that will resonate with our audience,” Granatstein says. “We focus on topics for which the brand organically has a unique POV and marry that with what we know will resonate with The Washington Post’s readership. Only after we’ve identified the story, do we think about the best way to tell it that is innovative and organic to the Post.  We call this method: Story first, last and always.”

The Post’s method is essential to creating quality, relatable and investment-worthy branded content. Readers who visit a news site and find sponsored content that feels like an afterthought won’t be impressed by the brand — or the publisher.

3) Have a clear call to action. That could be something as simple as directing readers or viewers to the sponsor’s website, having them sign up for a newsletter or asking them to install an app. “A clear [call to action] is a great way to get them to go beyond the content and have a direct interaction with your brand, thereby increasing the odds of recall,” Delany explains.

“In terms of long term vs. short term recognition, that’s a decision you need to make internally,” Delany continues. “We expect our content to drive traffic to the site immediately. That being said, we show different content at different stages of the funnel. One piece of content may be more relevant for those people at the beginning of the process and be used as a way to introduce our brand. We hope that this will have a long-term impact as they move through the process. Other pieces of content are meant for those that are further down the funnel. These should drive immediate action and (hopefully) conversion.”

If publishers and advertising partners follow these basic steps, we can expect to see more growth in the native ad realm. As Granatstein notes, “[Because] people are able to easily ignore ads, advertisers should be driven to create stories that are compelling and not directly promotional to reach them, creating a better reading experience.”

To do this, Delany suggests that publishers think of their branded content as if they were consumers.

“At the end of the day, we’re all consumers. We know what it feels like when a content creator promotes something in a style or category that is not at all consistent with their own personal brand. It feels disingenuous and, more often than not, doesn’t perform as well,” she says. “It’s all about striking that balance so both sides see benefit.”

This article is part of a new how-to series from the Alliance. Each week we’ll cover a new topic to help members figure out new ways to do business, from advertising opportunities to storytelling techniques and everything in between. And we want to know what you’re interested in reading about. Please email jennifer@newsmediaalliance.org or tweet @editrixjen and tell us what you’ve learned in the past year, or what you want to learn in the coming year. We look forward to hearing from you!

The post How To: Create Better Branded Content appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

The Federal Trade Commission issued an Enforcement Policy Statement on Deceptively Formatted Advertisements on December 22, 2015.  The Policy Statement addresses occasions in which certain media outlets blur the traditional line between advertisements and editorial content, and seeks to clarify advertisers’ and publishers’ obligations regarding native advertising and social media.

In addition to the Policy Statement, the FTC released an accompanying guidance, “Native Advertising: A Guide for Businesses,” to help companies understand and comply with the Policy Statement. The guidance provides examples of when and how to make effective disclosures in native advertisements.

The Policy Statement set forth the following factors that the FTC will consider to determine whether an advertisement is deceptive:

1. The net impression of the advertisement.

An advertisement or promotional message should not suggest or imply to consumers that it is anything other than an ad. In making this interpretation, the FTC will consider the net impression of the entire advertisement. The FTC conducts this analysis from the perspective of a reasonable consumer, but if an ad is targeted at a specific audience, the FTC will consider the effect of the ad’s format on reasonable or ordinary members of that targeted group. Moreover, if an advertiser intends to communicate a specific message, the FTC will presume that a reasonable consumer would understand that message.

2. Disclosures may be required.

Some native ads may be so clearly commercial in nature that they are unlikely to mislead consumers even without a specific disclosure. In other instances, however, a disclosure may be necessary to ensure that consumers understand that the content is advertising. The accompanying guidance provides a series of examples of instances where a disclosure would be required.

3. If a disclosure is required, it must be clear and prominent.

If a disclosure is necessary to prevent deception, it must be clear and prominent on all devices and platforms that consumers may use to view the native ad. The adequacy of a disclosure will be considered from the perspective of a reasonable consumer.

The accompanying guidance further explains steps advertisers can take to help ensure that disclosures will be considered clear and prominent:

a) Place disclosures on the main page of a publisher site where consumers will notice them and easily identify the content to which the disclosure applies.

b) Place disclosures in front of or above the headline of the native ad.

c) If a native ad’s focal point is an image or graphic, a disclosure might need to appear directly on the focal point itself.

d) If a single disclosure relates to more than one native ad, it should be accompanied by visual cues that make it clear the disclosure applies to each ad in the grouping.

e) Disclosures should remain when native ads are republished by others.

f) Once consumers arrive on the click- or tap-into page where the complete native ad appears, disclosures should be placed as close as possible to where they will look first.

g) In multimedia ads, a disclosure should be delivered to consumers before they receive the advertising message to which it relates.

h) Disclosures should stand out so that consumers can easily read or hear them.

i) Disclosures must be understandable.

The FTC was careful to note that its native advertising Policy Statement does not apply only to advertisers. Instead, the FTC warned that it will take action against parties who help create deceptive advertising content, including ad agencies and operators of affiliate advertising networks. Moreover, the FTC cautioned that “[e]veryone who participates directly or indirectly in creating or presenting native ads should make sure that ads don’t mislead consumers about their commercial nature.”

The guidelines have been anticipated by the industry since an FTC workshop on native advertising in December 2013. The new guidelines do not impose a strict labeling requirement, which would have raised concerns for our industry, but largely apply existing precedent. In July 2014, we published a White Paper providing newspapers with examples of what publishers are doing to provide greater transparency to consumers around sponsored content to differentiate between a native ad and editorial content. These examples in the white paper are consistent with the agency’s guidance on disclosures.

If you have any questions, please contact Kurt Wimmer, News Media Alliance General Counsel, at kwimmer@cov.com or Danielle Coffey, Vice President of Public Policy.

The post FTC Issues Policy Statement on Native Advertising appeared first on News/Media Alliance.