NEW YORK – Already a pioneer in the creation and delivery of high quality sponsored content, SlateCustom – Slate’s in-house creative agency with an editorial voice – is leading the market with expansive reach in the world of native advertising. As a product of a digital first, daily news source, SlateCustom has utilized a mix of multi-creative campaigns, content amplification and ad-serving technology to serve over 100-million native advertising impressions in the past month using Polar’s MediaVoice native ads platform.
“At first glance, the reach we’re accomplishing with our sponsored content is truly impressive”
SlateCustom taps into 18 years of experience to create a voice that engages its thought leader audience. From video and infographics to full-service editorial destinations like mid-marketpulse.com, SlateCustom is breaking outside of the listicle and sponsored blog format to create more immersive, broad scaled initiatives and branded editorial content that loyal readers of the site find engaging on its own merits.
“At first glance, the reach we’re accomplishing with our sponsored content is truly impressive,” says Lindsay Nelson, Slate’s Vice President of Integrated Programs and founder of the SlateCustom group. “But the real story is the engagement we’re seeing from readers. There is a lot of talk about content marketing, but rarely does the conversation delve into whether the content is actually good, or engaging. The programs where a brand entrusts us with the editorial and creative direction, we’re seeing readers behave sometimes on par with editorial averages.”
A recent campaign for the University of California boasted an average time-on-site of over 3 minutes for all combined creative pieces, and over 5 minutes on mobile. Slate’s mobile homepage native promotional placement gets a CTR well above that of a standard display ad and 33 percent higher than desktop placements of the same material. Although it might be initially surprising, 35 percent of Slate’s native ads are shared on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
“Polar’s commitment to scalability echoes ours,” said Nelson. “When we initially started our native advertising program a few years ago, we were publishing directly through the CMS. This is great for perfectly mimicking the editorial workflow; less ideal for mimicking the deep reporting and analytics an ad served solution can provide. Understanding reader flow and headline performance is critical to achieving meaningful, quality scale for branded content.”
Polar provides MediaVoice, the market leading native ads platform. MediaVoice’s ability to integrate seamlessly with Slate’s existing CMS to pull the custom content and then serve it using their existing DoubleClick ad-server, as well as its comprehensive set of reporting tools, not only helps Slate drive more traffic to their content campaigns with native distribution, but allows them to further examine what campaigns, placements, and headlines are working. It also provides the ability to strategically align branded content with relevant editorial, and geo-target campaigns to specific markets. This was especially useful in the University of California “Breakthrough” series aimed at residents of the college system’s home state.
“SlateCustom launched alongside a major redesign for site,” explains Slate Associate Publisher Anthony DeMaio. “We were afforded the chance to create a complete program for our advertising partners – an unrivaled package encompassing display ads, content creation, and promotion of their content. Client demand has matched our excitement; custom content represents over 40 percent of our revenue.” Slate’s sponsored content program has featured partner brands such as Prudential, Audi, and Paypal and have taken home numerous awards for their “Tomorrow Today” initiative with Lexus and last year’s “Roadshow for Growth“ with GE Capital.
“Slate gets the big picture when it comes to the future of publishing and native advertising,” says Kunal Gupta, Polar CEO. “By focusing on the exponential reach they can provide brands, and scaling those efforts with MediaVoice, they’ve set SlateCustom up to be the watermark by which other content studios should measure themselves.”
Please visit polar.me to request a demo or follow us at @aboutPolar to learn more.
