Washington Post to work with Polar’s MediaVoice for their native advertising initiative

The Washington Post will be working with Polar’s MediaVoice to empower their native advertising platform, which will be used to place native ads in-stream across desktop and mobile websites.

Washington Post’s native ad program, WP Brand Connect, is adopting the multimedia long-form template to be used in the newsroom for features. “WP Brand Studio is used by content marketers to create high-quality content for The Washington Post’s unique and influential audience,” Kevin Gentzel, Chief Revenue Officer, Washington Post explains to TalkingNewMedia.com. “MediaVoice is the tool used by WP Brand Studios to efficiently and relevantly service brands and connect them to global thought and opinion leaders however they read the Post.”

The Washington Post has chosen Polar’s MediaVoice native advertising platform to empower their sponsored content program “BrandConnect,” which was launched in early 2013 and is used by premium advertisers to include Audi, IBM, CVS, Land Rover, and Mercedes-Benz to connect with The Post’s quality audiences for better reader engagement. With this MediaVoice initiative, Post has introduced a new in-feed mobile native ad placement for their clients to extend reach cross-platform, while providing opportunities for marketers to engage with high-quality audiences and  provide better campaign insights to their advertisers who are increasing their investment in content marketing, FinancialPost reported.

The MediaVoice will further enable Post to deliver native ad content using its existing CMS tools and serve the ads using their existing ad servers that include DoubleClick, said Polar in its announcement. Polar’s MediaVoice will allow for campaign reporting, while promoting solution reach of their native ad programs through paid promotion on various search and social media outlets.

The BrandConnect ads will continue to be labeled “sponsor generated content” with a different background color and font from the newsroom. The first advertiser for the native ad platform is PhRMA, the trade group for the pharma industry. The sponsored content division of The Post further advised PhRMA to create articles that will be launched on March 3. This isn’t the first time that the sales side has peeked over the editorial side to get some inspiration for generating revenues from advertising, AdWeek.com reported. The New York Times has followed a similar pattern with its Idea Lab. The tweaks to BrandConnect initiative are just the beginning of a cosier relationship between news and advertising.

Furthermore, The Post is offering its advertisers the advantage of its Truth Teller Video Project, which was originally used to cross-check politician speeches and has now expanded to include trailers of movies such as Wolf of Wall Street and so on. Gentzel further assured that this collaboration between news units and the advertising platform will not allow compromise on The Post’s editorial integrity. He told AdWeek, "The credibility and trust of the investigative journalism that occurs in our newsroom is holy. We’re just saying, we can create a better, fulsome experience through design and engineering that includes advertising in an innovative and inventive way.”

BrandConnect ads will start appearing in the news stream on the Post’s mobile site with the PhRMA campaign as the first launch on its native ad platform. With publishers slowly migrating advertising models to the mobile platform, this move by The Post signals this shift but Gentzel wanted to be further certain about the paper’s native product before venturing into the mobile space; since half of the newspaper’s traffic comes from the mobile sites.

According to the recent digital trends reported by the Financial Post, the adoption of native advertising across the market is showing encouraging signs with eMarketer predicting digital sponsorship ad spends to increase to almost $2.3-billion in 2014, an increase of 20 percent over the previous year.

By: Savita V Jayaram