Month: March 2017

Six tips from SXSW for creating awesome native ads

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An old-style map - finding your way through new lands

“How do we transport the audience into the story?” asks Annie Granatstein, head of the Washington Post’s brand studio – the in-house native advertising team that creates thoughtful branded experiences within the Washington Post. It sounds almost exactly the same as what you’d hear from a reporter seeking to compellingly explain a complex issue. At SXSW Interactive,panelists Melissa Rosenthal, Annie Granatstein, Stephanie Losee and Melanie Deziel – experts in branded content partnerships with roles ranging from Head of Content at VISA to Head, WP Brand Studio – weighed in on the latest developments and trends in native ads.

Image quality (or lack thereof) in this picture of the native ad panelist bios is solely due to the use of a smartphone camera in a dark room.

Here’s what I learned: as branded content has grown, publishers have expanded their technological and storytelling sophistication, moving from listicles to deep, rich experiences like the New York Times’ partnership with Netflix around Orange is the New Black, “Women Inmates: Why the Male Model Doesn’t Work” that was the #2 piece of content on the NYT site in 2014, or a partnership between VISA and Quartz that resulted in a series of articles promoting tourism in China (using a VISA card), “China’s new “it” city charms travelers year-round.”

At the same time, brands’ expectations have expanded. Melissa Rosenthal of Cheddar explained that many are looking for highly unique native ads: ones where the content couldn’t just be rebranded by anyone else. As a result, publishers’ brand studios have almost become “creative agencies” themselves, working with brands to brainstorm ideas and develop unique creative expressions of a brand’s message that yet reflect the journalistic standards of the publication.

Four top insights for native ad planning

  • Come in with the takeaway. Annie Granatstein suggests that brands and agencies meeting with publishers should come in to the first meeting knowing what the audience should be feeling and doing as a result of the content. Many show up thinking about the technology – “we want a VR experience” when the emotional impact is what will stick with people.
  • Define your KPIs up front. A content piece intended for social engagement is going to be different than one driving deep engagement with a web story, and should be a part of planning from the beginning.
  • One-off activations are penny-wise and pound-foolish. When you do a one-off branded content piece, you’ve effectively launched a startup, says Stephanie Losee. You’ve put together an entire staff for a 6-7 figure project. Made and measured a beautiful thing. Then if you don’t do it again, your startup has folded and those partnerships and expertise have been lost. Think about partnerships that can be extended if successful.
  • Live events are possible but challenging. Publishers are interested in working with brands on live activations. But live can be risky: there’s no chance to go back and forth on approvals or to correct for on-air (or on-Facebook Live) gaffes. Preparation helps, as does having legal representatives in the room – but the risk is unavoidable and inherent in the activation.

And two value-adds to consider

  • License and share. Many publishers will either give brands ownership of their native ads or enable them to license it to re-share. So once it has been created, it can then be reshared on other publishers’ sites.
  • Paid media is essential for visibility. It’s not enough to have rich creative content. Just as publishers now have strategies for sharing and promoting their editorial content organically and in sponsored posts on Facebook, Instagram and other channels, branded content similarly needs a boost.

What do you see as the next steps in native advertising?

Burning your ships to create transformative change

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Burning your ships is never easy, but it can be a critical step in driving transformative change
“Alea iacta est,” said Caesar when he crossed the Rubicon marched on Rome to attempt to seize the mantle of emperor. That is to say, “The die is cast” and there is no way back. On the first day of SXSW Interactive, I heard from several folks working to transform the healthcare industry about how they see the path to success in driving transformative change – a panel called “To build in health, follow the $, not the patient.” The healthcare industry faces a broad array of challenges to any change, including:

  • A massive and interconnected network of organizations, all of whom have a stake in decisions
  • Heavy regulation
  • The need to maintain quality treatment for patients as change is happening. You can’t “move fast and break things” when it’s real people whose healthcare is being broken.

In the face of large obstacles, it’s a common instinct when trying to sell in a new plan, program or institutional transformation to begin with a pilot program. If your client or your senior leadership is reluctant to commit, try a pilot first to demonstrate proof of concept. It’s the startup way – create, iterate and scale.

Yet Matt Klitus, the CFO of MassHealth, Massachusetts’ Medicaid and CHIP program, an enormous institutional health provider in a highly regulated industry, rejected that idea.

“Really innovative systems are hard to pilot,” he said. “Sometimes you have to burn your ships.”

For example, healthcare is trying to move from a fee for service model, where payment is based on what treatments doctors provide, to a data based model where payment depends on what the eventual patient outcomes are – to improve efficiency by focusing on what matters. But healthcare payers like Medicaid or insurance companies can’t just move 10 or 20 percent of their patients into a totally different payment scheme as a pilot. The hospitals have to be on board, the doctors have to be on board for it to work, and asking them to shift their system for just a few patients to test results is doomed to failure.

So to really create transformative change in the system, healthcare payers have to burn their ships. They have to commit to a new payment model and insist that it’s the only model that they’ll use. Otherwise the internal considerations of everyone else in the system will drag it down. Of course, healthcare is also full of lots of creative pilots of new technologies for connecting patients with doctors and enabling treatments in new ways. So pilots aren’t wrong – they’re just sometimes the wrong choice when a transformative change is needed.

Similarly, companies looking to change their cultures – whether as part of a merger, as a result of new leadership, or a new set of goals – must decide if they are going to try working around the edges first or whether the change is so transformative that you have to commit if you’re going to succeed.

In these cases and others, you can’t fail early and fail often – you’re going to succeed or fail as a whole. It’s scarier and riskier, but sometimes it’s the necessary approach.

Where have you seen incremental change get lost in the system where transformative change might last?

Public domain image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/randnotizenorg/32000502742/.