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If you’re pouring your heart and soul into the creation of stellar branded content and then throwing it over the fence to your ad operations team in hopes that it finds your intended audience, you might be appalled to discover how much of your hard work is going to waste. These days, the disconnect between a brand’s content team and the people tasked with promoting that content through ad campaigns is vast. As a result, a lot of great content isn’t being seen by the right audiences — if it’s being seen at all.
That needs to change.
It's upsetting that premium campaigns with great content don't reach their intended audience. This typically happens for one of two reasons:
- The ads driving traffic to that premium content are poorly designed.
- The ads to promote the content are being placed in the wrong location.
The marketers tasked with creating a brand’s content typically aren’t responsible for the ad units and campaigns designed to promote that content. For them, the campaigns are an afterthought —someone else’s responsibility. This mentality presents a fundamental problem when it comes to overall marketing impact and ROI.
It would be the same as going to the gym for hours every day, only to come home and eat fast food every night because you don’t fancy yourself a cook. In the end, all that hard work at the gym isn’t going to do you any good if you don’t take at least some responsibility for the other essential half of the equation.
Ad operations teams are often overloaded and just trying to ensure the dozens (if not hundreds) of ads they’re tasked with trafficking make it out the door. Their priorities and incentives to ensure a brand’s premium content gets seen and appreciated aren’t always reflective of the massive work that went into creating that rich and compelling content in the first place.
It’s time for content teams to step up their ownership of the ad campaigns that support their premium branded content. In doing so, here are some key points to keep in mind:
Communications Matters: To ensure a brand’s premium content is hitting the mark in the campaigns designed to promote it, content studios and ad ops teams need to enhance their processes for communication and collaboration.
Don’t Accept the Average CTR: Premium content deserves to be promoted via premium ad units with premium placements, and the results of such campaigns should surpass those of standard display campaigns. If your sponsored content campaigns are delivering click-through rates on par with industry benchmarks for basic display, don’t accept those results as “good enough.”
Placement Matters: Successful promotion of premium content is about more than just the right content and the right audience; it’s about the right placement. Too many campaigns fall short because ad units, while technically viewable, are not actually being viewed. Marketers should ensure their strongest content is getting the strongest possible placement, which tends to be within native units that exist within the main flow of content.
Use the Available Tools: Be sure your team is using the platform optimization tools available when it comes to supercharging your content-driven campaigns. Lean into A/B testing and creative optimization in order to improve campaign efficiency and reduce wasted ad spend. Particularly now, given the rise of generative AI, marketers don’t have to rely on their instincts when it comes to crafting and testing creative and copy variations. The platforms can do it for you— but you must put them to use.
Better content deserves better advertising—and that starts with better communication and collaboration.
About Nativo
At Nativo, we enable brands to unlock the power of content to engage and influence their audiences. Our patented technology leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate the distribution of content in a non-interruptive, fully integrated experience within trusted environments. Our mission at Nativo is to solve the mid-funnel and drive consideration by making content as easy to execute, scale, and measure as advertising.
Founded by Justin Choi in 2010, Nativo is an Asian American-owned technology company—certified by NMSDC as a Minority Business Enterprise—holding more than a dozen patents in its proprietary technology and working with more than 7,000 premium publisher websites around the globe. Learn more at www.nativo.com.