To summarize, the biggest challenges include:
- Scale and the economics of creating custom ad units for campaigns with limited page views
- Pricing
- Aligning advertiser's goals with publisher's audience experience
- Available resources to pull it all together
- Advertisers & agencies relinquishing control of creative
From our experience, the most successful publishers who sell native display sponsorships simplify the process. Here is how it is done:
1 - Find formats that get approved editorially. Find the balance of what attracts an audience's attention while not disrupting the user's experience. Ad units that fit into the look and feel of the site deliver an amazing branding & transaction vehicle while complimenting the publisher's brand. When done right, this approach improves the viewer's experience since many members of an audience visit a publisher's site as much for the advertisers and learning what is going on in their field as much as they rely on the editorial content of the media.
A big consideration in format selection is flexibility. Make sure that you are getting a format or placement approved that has the ability to deliver a variety of creative assets so that each campaign can be customized to most effectively achieve an advertiser's goals. Make sure the placement is not solely for video or e-commerce or registration. Do your advertiser a service by offering a canvas that delivers the assets most appropriate for their campaign goals.
2 - Pricing. Our most successful publishing clients base their pricing on time based sponsorships. They sell high impact branding placements as an exclusive by number of days. This eliminates frequency capping and time of day delivery. Based on an average number of page views publishers can comfortable set impression minimums but that should not be the focus of the ad sale.
3 - Available Resources to Put it All Together. This is where publishers rely on CheckM8. We specialize in two areas critical in native display ad units - creative development and site integration.
Site Integration - Without a solution that provides ad serving, the publisher is left to integrating native ad units into their site through their CMS. They actually need to change the web site. This puts the entire site stability at risk with the limited gain of delivering an ad campaign. Add to this the inability to track interactions when an ad unit is hard coded into the site. Stack on the complexity of creating an ad unit/units that reach the audience on tablets, phones and desktops and you easily identify why native display is not as common as it is effective.
Creative - For creative to be done right, each campaign needs to be adjusted to fit the advertiser's goals. There is only so much templatization a publisher can do without becoming stale. The limited number of native display campaigns and the complexity of creating unique units for each screen (tablet, phone & desktop) makes this a full time job for a limited scale placement and very inefficient.
The above reasons are exactly why top tier publishers work with CheckM8 on their native display advertising campaigns. We are experts in site integration and creative development while giving our clients the time and attention they deserve for site specific campaigns. Other vendors discourage non standard campaigns since they don't have massive scale.
4 - Advertisers & Creative Control. Finally, working with a third party vendor to execute native display ads has two real advantages:
The first is using them as a liaison between the advertiser and the site to make sure that advertisers and their agencies don't lose creative control while not creating a placement that will violate the publisher's user experience guidelines. Having an expert on both sides of the equation not only makes for better ad creation but a vendor like CheckM8 serves as a buffer when conflicting opinions arise. Our expertise on both sides enables us to effectively communicate the other side's point of view and find simple solutions that satisfies all parties.
Secondly, when advertisers work directly with the vendor it gives them the ability to create high impact placements that can scale to multiple sites without forcing multiple publishers to recreate the entire unit. Build once, tweak often. This allows for creative optimization for native display ad campaigns running on multiple sites along with one source for tracking interactions.
CheckM8 distinguishes itself by being the one source solution for native display advertising for desktop, tablets & phones and it is our purpose to help advertisers and publishers deliver more effective campaigns while simplifying the process.
