In 2018, Branded Content Has Changed Its Course to Driving Home Better Bespoke Creatives. These Branded Content Garner a Genuine Response to the Content Marketing Campaigns, Demonstrating a Publisher’s Ability to Distribute High-Quality Content to Premium Customers

Branded Content is an effective medium to promote a product or a service effectively on a website and social media. With the perils of Fake News and malvertising pushing marketers and publishers towards negative branding, it’s time to lay clear ground rules for Branded Content in 2018. To fortify the state of branding in content marketing and programmatic advertising in 2018, TripleLift launched ContentDial. To better understand the power of ContentDial and its benefits in Programmatic Advertising, we spoke to Jason Kleinman, GM, Branded Content at TripleLift.

Linking Programmatic Advertising to Branded Content

How is Branded Content linked to programmatic advertising?

Today, the connection between programmatic advertising and branded content is that programmatic media is oftentimes used to amplify content. In fact, we execute many of these campaigns today, in which we create and run native in-feed ads linking to branded content that typically lives on an advertiser’s site.

You might say that our DNA in native programmatic has led organically to ContentDial — a first-to-market programmatic platform that makes branded content simple, scalable and effective – in that branded content is essentially a larger, more elaborate version of a native ad. When you consider the traits of a great native ad – a respectful user experience, beautiful design, imagery, headlines, logos – it’s all about storytelling.

And so, we take all those same elements on a larger canvas – where we can paint with works, images, and videos to tell stories that resonate with readers and move the needle for marketers.

ContentDial: The Amalgamation of Science and Art of Branded Content

What is the core idea behind introducing ContentDial?

ContentDial brings data and technology to the art of branded content to make it easier to buy, make, distribute, measure and optimize. Having run branded content studios and content marketing for large publishers in my past lives, I know both the pleasure and the pain it can provide or inflict on an agency, a publisher and even a reader.

Branded content presents specific challenges for advertisers: it’s difficult to maximize reach, measurement isn’t standardized, and the ROI that comes through optimization is hard to come by.

ContentDial solves for these: we use data-based branded content intelligence to inform content strategy, formats and publisher partners that will perform; we use “lightweight” formats that are quicker to make, quicker to approve and quicker to market; we customize content so a single activation can run with multiple publishers; we maximize reach by incentivizing publishers to promote it within social channels; and we have our automated measurement and optimization to heighten ROI.

On the publisher side, increased competition among branded content studios, margin compression on deals, and ad budgets shifting to programmatic are problems that ContentDial may not solve, but through the offering we were able to provide publishers great content, new demand sources, and yet another way for them to monetize, all through a low-touch turnkey solution that lean into what they do best: post and promote content.

ContentDial Could Work for Every Ad Category

Which set of marketers and advertisers would benefit the most from leveraging ContentDial?

ContentDial can provide value to a wide array of advertisers, from Fortune 100 brands that already have in-house content creation capabilities (where we can help with reach and optimization), to mid-market (by lowering the barrier to entry), and even to performance marketers (as we’ve seen with our Stash Invest campaign).

Though we’ve just launched this in Q1, we have already seen significant interest from brands across the spectrum of ad categories, especially in auto, technology, travel, and CPG.

In truth, ContentDial should work for every ad category, as the common denominator is that we can help brands tell great stories that ultimately help them achieve desired business outcomes.

Branded Content Intelligence Is at the Core of ContentDial

What is the State of Programmatic Advertising in 2018? How much of this state is influenced by improvement in data science, automation and brand safety regulations?

That’s a large question, so let’s focus on it through the lens of ContentDial. Branded content intelligence is at the core, and we have a data science team who has indexed hundreds of thousands of branded content campaigns across the Internet. We then do deep data mining to detect patterns of success in both content topics, formats, and publisher partners.

The automation of content strategy, project management, and measurement means that brands can enjoy the benefits of branded content without some of the pain that typically comes with it. ContentDial is uniquely positioned to deliver on brand safety. We curate and work with premium publishers, who publish the content within their own CMSs and promote it within the walled gardens of social platforms to drive views and engagement.

ContentDial is Tailored for Each Brand and Campaign Measurement Plan

How should brands measure their campaign effectiveness in 2018?

Our approach with ContentDial is that while we offer a full suite of performance, engagement and brand metrics, we start by tailoring each brand and campaign measurement plan to the advertiser’s desired business outcomes. And when we run a campaign, each publisher partner garners an activation score that ultimately determines how we allocate optimization budgets.

Additionally, social engagement continues to loom large, especially given the shifting sands of Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm. Here again, ContentDial makes us uniquely positioned to understand which publishers will garner the meaningful social interaction that Facebook has prioritized.

TripleLift Has the Most Robust Third-Party Compatibility

How does TripleLift help close the gap between various stages of ad performance reporting?

This question is more easily answered from the perspective of our core native programmatic offering. TripleLift has the most robust third-party compatibility within the native programmatic space.

We invested heavily early on in making sure that our clients would be able to not only leverage our internal measurement solutions but additionally to bring their own third-party verification to native media buying. We understand that viewability, fraud and brand safety are issues that are only going to continue to rise in importance to brands, agencies, and trading desks.

As the industry continues to emphasize the importance of quality on both sides of the ad exchange, TripleLift will continue to invest in solutions to ensure that publishers and buyers are both able to measure these important pillars of quality with proprietary measurement as well as MRC accredited third-party vendors.

TripleLift and the World of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the Programmatic and Native Advertising Industry

Today, the most prominent place AI/ML is being implemented across the programmatic (and native) ecosystem is within the media buying platforms. DSPs leverage AI/ML to predict the outcomes (and therefore value) of an impression within the context of a given advertising campaign. These algorithms, decision engines and models are often what DSPs claim as their ‘special sauce.’

By creating separate models for separate outcomes, DSPs can optimize and predict the value of the impression with a specific outcome in mind (clicks, views, actions, etc). DSPs have invested very heavily in data science teams over the last few years in order to bolster these optimization and decision mechanisms. From the specific lens of branded content, you can imagine a world in which AI/ML can help with data analysis, content creation and the entire supply chain.