The From Line

When I was in high school in the early 90’s I was tasked with selling advertising for the school newspaper.  With little understanding of what media and printing was all about, I was told our school newspaper sold ads by the column inch.  But the column inch wasn’t a real inch.  It was 11 picas or roughly 1.83 inches.  This confused me as I didn’t understand how I was going to convince an advertiser to place an ad in a measurement that really wasn’t what it was.  I soon figured out that the column inch was standardized across all newspapers and it wasn’t unique to my particular school.  After I mastered the column inch learning curve, needless to say I was much more successful at selling newspaper ads than trying to explain what it is.

Native advertising is a tough nut to crack. It’s not just black and white. While it is one of the fastest growing advertising segments, a lot of publishers are still in the dark when it comes to the wide spectrum of native advertising. 

By definition, native advertising is a form of paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form and function of the user experience in which it is placed. Native advertising is NOT content marketing. There’s a big difference. Content marketing is a type of advertising message while native advertising, is a type of distribution.

The buzz word of the year is most definitely automation. Everyone uses it, in almost every industry. Of course, I can only speak for the email technology industry where automation has reached new heights. Automation features in email are now available to even the smallest of publishers. The cost to automate email newsletters has dropped substantially, leaving no excuse NOT to automate.

As publishers, we’re obsessed with content relevance. However, with audience fragmentation it has become quite the challenge to remain relevant since multiple audiences often exist on a publisher’s list. Although there’s  a lot of interest overlap, it’s difficult to hold the interest of an entire audience without losing the attention of a few.

Gold Lasso conducted an email engagement study with 32 publishers that send one column newsletters.  Our findings concluded that the majority of newsletter clicks happens on the first two stories, with almost half going to the top story.  This interesting statistic repudiates the idea of "the more content the better," and should encourage publishers to shorten their email communications.  

In my last post we talked about the D.A.R.T. framework used to mold subscriber’s engagement. Although Design, as discussed, is the heaviest variable in training your subscriber’s to engage, the three other pieces of the puzzle are crucial as well.