Postmedia is further leveraging its expertise in the content marketing space – 500 programs completed since 2007 – with the launch of a new native advertising platform called Postmedia Content Solutions.
The new platform is intended to make native advertising programs more accessible to both national and local advertisers, while further integrating native advertising within the editorial environment.
Yuri Machado, Postmedia’s senior vice-president of integrated advertising sales and strategy, said scalability was one of the company’s top priorities in the native advertising space.
“It’s being able to provide the biggest bank or automotive company with a content-based program, [as well as] hyper-local clients that really have a geographic purview and want to use different tools beyond display and search to engage their customers,” he said.
The platform was developed in association with native advertising specialists Polar, which has worked with major publications including The Washington Post, the New York Post and The Economist, as well as major publishers including Hearst and News Corp. In Canada, Polar’s clients include Flare, The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail.
The platform uses Polar’s MediaVoice system, which connects a publisher’s content management system and ad servers to serve relevant content based on geography, demographics and consumer behaviour.
If a reader on a Postmedia site has looked at several automotive-related pages, for example, the system can push out a piece of automotive related native content. “It gives us a lot of flexibility to get good strong engagement,” said Machado.
While most of Postmedia’s native content was previously restricted to the right rail, the new network will serve content in the main editorial environment. Native content on the right rail got 2.5 times the engagement of a traditional display ad, but Machado said engagement scores would “definitely” increase when content appears in the main editorial space.
To maintain journalistic integrity, Postmedia will ensure all native ad content is clearly identified. Machado said research suggests the more transparent publishers are around native content, the better the engagement scores.
Postmedia is offering three layers of transparency: A tag identifying content as sponsored, presented or promoted by an advertiser; a clickable “I” icon that enables readers to learn exactly how the content was produced, and a disclosure at the end of the story. The font for native ad copy is also different from that used in Postmedia’s editorial content, he said.
Machado said the rise of programmatic is leading to reduced CPMs for display advertising, leading Postmedia to embrace native advertising. “We definitely want to be aggressive in this space because it is one of our key pillars,” he said.
The new division will use the existing Postmedia Labs team, which launched in 2013 as an R&D-focused unit committed to developing new brand offshoots, through the so-called “Communities Initiative,” which is focused on encouraging people to share content.
The native network is currently available across all of Postmedia’s major properties, including the National Post, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal and Driving.ca, with Canada.com coming on-stream next month.
Postmedia will also use its social listening tools to push appropriate content via the various social media channels.
While more publishers are adopting native advertising programs, Machado said Postmedia’s national scope and its local market presence – as well as its use of data – differentiate it from its competitors.
“We’re putting together the natural journalistic instincts we have with data,” he said. “That’s really one of our differentiators.”
