branded content

To survive and stay relevant, publishers like Ziff Davis and Black Enterprise are creating commerce-related content.

The vast majority (72%) of people say they would choose brands that use humor effectively over their competitors. The challenge is helping brands “find their funny” while also standing out from the deluge of branded content, says Stephen Loguidice, SVP and head advertising at Hartbeat, a media venture owned by actor and comedian Kevin Hart.

Since Fortune was sold by Meredith to a private investor in 2018, it’s been laser focused on striking branded content partnerships with advertising clients through the Fortune Brand Studio – and it’s paying off. The business new publisher generated around $100 million in revenue last year, a third of which came from its digital advertising and subscription business.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Mountain Of Money When ViacomCBS promoted Paramount Plus ahead of its launch, subscribers were promised “a mountain of entertainment.” And the company is continuing to put a mountain of money behind that tagline. The company said Monday that it’s looking to raise $3 billion […]

The company behind a cable channel for babies has built a thriving branded content business on social media. The against-the-grain strategy comes as many digital publishers de-emphasize social media, instead eying video and connected TV as their next big revenue streams. First Media made the switch in 2016, a decade after it was founded as […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Zuck Abides Readers might be forgiven for thinking this has been a brutal year for Facebook, given the long string of scandals and investigations the company has faced. But in some important ways, Facebook is humming along as smoothly as ever, according to […]

As many brands move to six-second spots to promote their brands, Grey Goose has gone in the other direction with “Off Script,” a nine-episode series featuring 10-minute segments of Jamie Foxx interviewing celebrities. Participants include Melissa McCarthy, Gabrielle Union, Vince Vaughn and Sarah Silverman. “We wanted to change the model from interrupting with branded content […]

SourceMedia, the Observer Capital–owned publisher of financial trades like American Banker and The Bond Buyer, along with other B2B sites, is taking a page from the B2C playbook. While B2B pubs have been slower to embrace programmatic, SourceMedia plans to buck that trend by being a better steward of its first-party data. A new integration […]

The global health and wellness industry is on the fast track to growth, and upstart publisher Well+Good is reaping the benefits. Well+Good began in April 2010 with only 69 subscribers and today, its reach is well over 10 million uniques across digital, social and email, according to Tyler Del Vento, SVP of sales and marketing […]

L’Oreal will expand a media ownership strategy it piloted in Mexico to other Spanish-speaking countries to generate first-party cookies from its customer base. The idea is similar to sponsored content, but instead of working with a brand-name media company on a story package, for the past year L’Oreal has developed fiufiu, a kind of pop-up […]

Spanish-language broadcaster Univision hopes to offset declines in local TV ad revenue by doubling down on its digital ad business. It was an early adapter of Facebook Watch, Snapchat Discover and Snapchat Live Stories to reach its audience of millennial Hispanics, but Univision is emphasizing multiplatform campaigns to boost digital revenue. (Univision’s digital ad revenue […]

As branded content becomes a bigger part of media budgets, marketers need to show how content is driving results for their brands. They want to prove that content can create not just awareness, but also purchase consideration and sales. To help marketers achieve those objectives, Refinery29 rolled out a product Monday dubbed Converge to connect […]

Product placements aren’t new, but with the rise of subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services – and a reduction in cable networks’ commercial loads – branded TV content is primed to take off. That said, it’s hard to credit a sale of a bucket of KFC chicken to Jimmy Kimmel peddling it on his late-night show, so one company […]

Mindbodygreen is making a credible run at the content-and-commerce model. The health and wellness publisher, which sees around 10 million unique visitors a month, eschews traditional advertising in favor of a combination of content and commerce, “with community in the middle,” said CEO and founder Jason Wachob. Mindbodygreen has 5,000 contributors, some of whom are […]

Audio is still an uncluttered medium where a brand like General Electric can stretch its creative muscles. “We look at audio like a total white space,” said Alexa Christon, GE’s head of media innovation. That’s why GE is re-upping its investment in audio with “LifeAfter,” the soon-to-be-released second season of GE Podcast Theater, a modern […]

If the content is good, the distribution – paid, earned or otherwise – nearly takes care of itself, said Anthony Ingham, global brand leader at W Hotels & Resorts. “We’ve steered away from peppering tactical ads in mass numbers across multiple channels,” Ingham said. “We start with the premise of trying to create the best content, and then […]

How do you crush it with organic views and shares in a sea of paid content? Raw humor and parody seem to be doing the trick for Someecards, the e-card site founded by former MRM and Avenue A/Razorfish creative VPs in 2007. As the self-described antithesis of the Hallmark greeting card, Someecards started out creating […]

Brands need to earn the right to advertise directly to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. It’s a matter of credibility, said Albert Thompson, a digital strategist at multicultural marketing agency Walton Isaacson, in charge of the Lexus business. The car brand has a longstanding relationship with LGBT media company Q.Digital, the parent to […]

For branded content to be a success, it must hurdle two key challenges. First, it must be authentic, entertaining and relevant, and second, it must be distributed effectively. Via a partnership with Guardian Labs, website design company Squarespace is attempting to do just that. The 39-part series “Side Hustle,” unfolding over Q4 2015 and Q1 […]