Brands are increasingly placing advertising alongside the content they produce, but rather than pitching it to third-party advertisers, some are finding it easier to “sell” that space to other teams within their own companies.
Brand-owned publications are increasingly attempting to directly monetize the content they create, either by charging their audiences or third-party marketing partners. Robinhood-owned Sherwood has hired revenue execs from the publishing world to turn its existing and new newsletters into a source of advertising revenue, for example. Meanwhile, the rise of “retail media” is prompting more companies to explore ways to generate revenue by selling access to their customer bases and audiences.
But selling ad space isn’t easy, and it’s far from a core competency for brand publishers and content teams operating within non-traditional media companies. At the same time, many are finding the strongest demand for the audience attention they’re generating is coming from other departments and teams within their own companies. That’s prompting some to rethink how they can use ad inventory that they’ve already generated.
“While I understand the instinct to monetize media operations, I think a better use of these pageviews is in-house ads, said Emily Anne Epstein, former head of content at Asana and president of Decopop Agency. “Advertise that next webinar. Advertise your next user conference. Advertise your product launch. Advertise that job your talent department can’t fill. Advertise your customer’s new CEO. Companies have so much going on every month; they can use their captive audience to further their own campaigns.”
“It comes down to credit at the end of the day,” said a content lead at a health brand. “What we do is often unseen, invisible. So one way to get that credit is to use our real estate to advertise actual company products and link those back.”
Using existing inventory alongside content to promote company products, jobs, conferences or people can also be a more fruitful place to divert customer attention, say marketers. Instead of earning ad dollars, it can be a way for content to earn its keep — and can be more beneficial to the overall company as well.
“Heavy lift’
“Getting into the advertising business is in itself a heavy lift that requires a lot of work across the business to do well,” said Natalie Mendes, head of content at Atlassian.
Paul Borselli, a former publishing head of sales who now consults with brands and publishers on revenue and marketing said that the issue is that content teams operate within marketing teams, and companies don’t want to spend more money setting up a sales organization within those teams. Brands are usually looking for ways to get a better return on ad spend, or a better ROI, on their owned media. Putting in the money to hire salespeople to sell inventory externally often doesn’t match up to overall belief systems, said Borselli.
One reason so many brands have at least considered selling ads alongside their content is because they want a way to directly connect content efforts with dollars and cents. But that may not always be realistic, or even an attainable goal. Often, it can have the effect of distracting content teams from creating quality work, and change incentives or structures entirely.
Instead, it may be better if marketers look for other signals to prove content drive customer interest, says Austin Beveridge, co-founder at GoliathData and former head of marketing at Arc.
And if they do want to figure out what to do with the inventory they are generating, it may be time to get creative. GoliathData is using space within its guides and content for real estate professionals to promote partners. “You can make some affiliate revenue, but the goal is to build relationships first and foremost,” said Beveridge. “After all, the exact purpose of brand content, arguably, is to not sell [customers] anything at all.”
“I think more than selling to external advertisers, brands will look to use their existing content to sell “ad units” for their products and services,” said Mendes of Atlassian. “Content marketing typically takes a soft-sell approach especially when it comes to brand journalism, but I think brands could build a stronger pipeline applying the best of the ads business to their existing products and services.”
Sometimes, the definition of “ad space” itself is different. At marketing accelerator Traction, the company holds events for chief marketing officers and other marketing leaders (who also happen to be its main clients) – events that now have tech companies asking to sponsor them so that they can also be in the same room. The company’s next event, for example, is sponsored by marketing software company Pixis. “We’re primarily doing that so we can host more events and produce more content, but the path to monetizing this is very clear if we were to choose to pursue it,” said Traction CEO Adam Kleinberg.