An ad tech firm has a plan to help advertisers not burn so much time and money on branded content

Flickr/Bob
Dass

• The ad tech firm TripleLift has a new product designed
  to make it easier for advertisers to run branded content at
  scale.
• TripleLift’s ContentDial promises ad buyers access to
  unique data sets that should help them figure out what kind of
  ad-funded content will perform best on what websites.
• The firm employs freelancers to create articles and
  videos for brands — which should reduce the costs of these
  campaigns.
• It won’t be easy to compete with the dozens of branded
  content studios run by major publishers. 

Brands are pouring money into automated, programmatic
advertising, using all sorts of data and analytics to zap ads to
the right person.

They’re also pumping budgets into branded content — articles and
videos created on behalf of advertisers to subtly communicate
their messages. That high touch, highly customized form of
advertising is basically the polar opposite of programmatic.

Yet the ad tech company TripleLift has an ambitious plan to marry
these two very different practices.

The firm has recently been testing a new product, ContentDial,
which purports to help marketers create articles and videos on
their behalf quickly and more efficiently than they do when going
directly to a big publisher like
The New York Times or BuzzFeed.

ContentDial also boasts of a proprietary analytics platform
designed to help these brands figure out what content is likely
to perform the best on which publishers’ website and social media
accounts before these advertisers commit to a pricey campaign.

The big idea is to make paying for digital ad content easier,
faster, and smarter. Think branded content light.

The question is whether that’s at all possible to do at scale
with an ad format that is typically more art than science, and
inherently requires lots of heavy lifting.

TripleLift wants to go after different ad budgets by delivering
cheaper and better branded content

TripleLift has built a solid business helping advertisers buy
‘native’ ads that borrow the look and feel of all sorts of
website and apps.

But to date, it basically had no means of going after custom
branded content budgets. 

“When speaking with brands and agencies, their digital
investments are either going programmatic, or branded content,
which we previously hadn’t applied our technology towards,”
said said Ari Lewine, TripleLift’s cofounder and chief
strategy officer.

The kind of bespoke content that Lewine’s referring to doesn’t
typically rely on tech and data, but more on creativity and
brainstorming.

“We thought, ‘what if the entire process was dictated by data?'”
he said.

So TripleLift built its own proprietary tools to log branded
content campaigns, and measure which are most effective at
getting people to engage — everything from reading articles to
sharing and comment on videos. Then, using artificial
intelligence and predictive analytics, ContentDial claims it
can help an advertiser figure out which articles and videos will
perform best, and where they should be distributed.

And rather than tapping an expensive content studio, the company
also employs a network of freelancers to create the ad-funded
articles and videos.

“What we’ve seen when applying this tech and data is that we
could bring down costs considerably while creating more effective
content,” said Lewine. “Basically, we can start to understand how
content will perform before its even published.”

ContentDial’s analytics
dashboard
TripleLift

So far, TripleLift has worked
with publishers such as USA Today, New York Magazine, Rolling
Stone and Bleacher Report to distribute branded content. One of
the first advertisers is Visit Las Vegas, which used content to
reach out to sports fans during the
Las Vegas Golden Knights recent highly unexpected run to the
Stanley Cup finals (this was the first year of the team’s
existence)

TripleLift’s new
ContentDial product
TripleLift

Trisha Stecker, associate media director at the ad agency R&R
Partners, which oversaw
the Vegas effort, liked the idea of having more assurance
that campaigns will actually click with consumers.

“You would have had to spend bad money to test these campaigns,”
she said. “And you’d historically spend a few hundred grand with
large publishers. These guys are able to find content that will
resonate.”

During the Golden Knights playoff run, ContentDial was able to
crank out
custom content in just 19 days.
The articles were viewed 2 million times
collectively, Stecker said, and the average time spent with

each post was two minutes and three seconds. 70% of
total campaign views were longer than 10 seconds.

“We felt like we were going out of the gate with stuff that would
work,” she said.

David
Becker/AP

Of course, it won’t be easy to disrupt the
branded content marketplace, where dozens of publications
ranging from Conde Nast to The Wall Street Journal produce
articles for paying advertisers with the promise of journalistic
quality and content geared for a specific audience.

Their output can range from fun lists like Everyone
Has An Iconic Back-To-School Look That Matches Their Personality
— What’s Yours? to a diligent reported feature on the
cocaine trafficking industry created by the Wall Street Journal’s
content studio for the Netflix show “Narcos.”

“All agencies now work to use data to inform creative,” said Adam
Puchalsky, SVP, Managing Director at UM Studios, which helps
create content for brands. “So I’m not sure if there is anything
new there.”

“The freelancer model is interesting, but as a brand marketer,
you lose a close connection with the team that loves your brand
as much as you do and will work tirelessly to grow with your
brand,” said Puchalsky. “You also lose the authenticity that
a publication can deliver to their audience.”

TripleLift
promises it can help brands figure out which sites will perform
best for branded content
TripleLift

Jason Kleinman, TripleLift’ general manager of branded content,
had previously logged stints at media companies Hearst and The
Guardian, and acknowledged the value of those connections. 

But in his experience, they were often few and far
between. “You can spend
months refining concepts, and you’ll have
the 350 thread
emails, it can definitely
be maddening. Nobody
knows if its going to work or not.”

“
Everybody remembers that one the Times did
for ‘Orange is the New Black,'” he said,
referring to a memorable feature the Times branded studio
produced in 2014 for the Netflix show.

“There are probably a hundred or
so of these out there. But other times your content
m
ight sink like a
stone.”