How automation will change content and native ads
When the study asked agency and brand professionals in the UK and US about barriers that were preventing them from doing more with content marketing and native advertising, lack of resources and budget to deliver high-quality content efficiently was the biggest issue, cited by 55 per cent.
Difficulty measuring and proving return on investment (ROI) was second, at half of respondents. Coming in third was the inability to target and distribute at scale. Technology will help agency and brand professionals, as well as publishers, overcome these boundaries and change the future of content and native. Six in 10 respondents said automation tools would allow for more precise data-driven targeting, and a close 58 per cent would be able to resolve the ROI issue with better measurement and optimisation techniques. Distributing content at scale and creating quality content more quickly were also expected to be results of marketing automation. In all, just 11 per cent of respondents said such tech wouldn’t improve content and native.
Adoption of programmatic and automation tools for native advertising remains low, at just 23 per cent of US client-side marketers, according to Q4 2014 data from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). And in a November 2014 study by Undertone, fewer than a quarter of US publishers, agencies and marketers each bought or sold native ads programmatically.
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