The situation

Nativo is the leader in native advertising, creating and distributing sponsored content for its clients at scale. The company’s True Native format tailors content to match the look and feel of each of hundreds of publishers that specifically reach the advertiser’s target audience, so that consumers experience the branded content like any other article.

A leading household goods manufacturer chose Nativo for a campaign to support the launch of its new brand of breakthrough food storage containers, with patented technology that keeps produce fresher much longer than traditional packaging. Given that digital budgets were limited and this was the first time the client included native advertising in their media mix, they wanted to closely measure the campaign’s impact.

The challenge

Nativo had always been able to deliver highly targeted audiences due to its broad reach. However, as with most native advertising campaigns, just a few hundred thousand consumers typically interact with the content – not a large enough number for conventional brand lift research. As a consequence, they were limited to media metrics for past campaign measurement, and lacked data for lifts in brand metrics and shifts in perception to fully quantify the value of deep engagement with customized content.

The solution

Dynata created a solution by leveraging three unique strengths:

1. Robust first-party panel with low turnover among panel members
2. Seamless measurement across all digital screens and devices
3. Scale of panel coupled with high response rates from panel members

Content was served directly to Dynata panel members, with exposure captured passively using a dynamic ad tag. The scale offered by Dynata, coupled with the representative and responsive nature of the panel, allowed Nativo to execute ad effectiveness studies that yielded stable data. By surveying exposed and non-exposed (control) panel members, Nativo gained metrics on campaign elements that were previously unmeasurable, including awareness, recall, purchase intent and favorability as well as content engagement and interactions with native videos.

The results

Dynata demonstrated that Nativo’s True Native format drove exceptional lift across key upper funnel metrics:

1. Unaided Awareness soared 35 percentage points, compared to Dynata’s cross-device digital benchmark of a +5 percentage point increase. First mentions of the brand also rose dramatically, from 3rd in the control group to 1st in the exposed group.
2. Aided Awareness climbed 16 percentage points, compared to a digital benchmark of a 4 percentage point lift.
3. Online Ad Awareness rose significantly; after engaging with the content, a respondent was four times more likely to recall the True Native editorial, which translated to a lift of 27 percentage points.
4. Positive Brand Perception shot up by 28 percentage points, with 74 percent of the target audience agreeing the brand “keeps produce fresher longer” after exposure, compared to 46 percent in the control group.