What you need to know:

• Advertisers are buying ad spots in premium publishers and filling them with content made by influencers for platforms like TikTok or Instagram.
• News Corp and oOh! Media are vying for bigger slice of social budgets.
• Influencer agency Born Bred Talent’s Clare Winterbourn said influencer content in a news article gets watch times over 24 seconds versus six to eight seconds in TikTok itself.
• Connected TV and BVOD are next.

Major publishers are clawing back advertising spend from big tech by using their own formats against them, with News Corp and others embedding social posts and TikTok videos into article ad units with claims they are driving three to four times the engagement of social platforms at lower cost.

Instead of paying for an influencer or brand’s post to be ‘boosted’ on a social platform, tech players like Fabulate and Nova effectively lift the ads and stick them onto publisher platforms.

“TikTok watch times are six to eight seconds. Every single one of our campaigns [through premium publishers], no watch time has dropped below 24 seconds,” Clare Winterbourn, founder of creator agency Born Bred Talent, said. “When you’re paying for a piece of content, people are watching six seconds, they’re not even getting to the call to action.”

News Corp is embedding Instagram and TikTok posts into news articles wooing advertisers keep to tap its claimed 16 million audience identifiers. “You’ll be scrolling through an article and you’ll come to this placement that looks exactly like a social post, same looking image with likes, description, or if it’s a video post, it looks exactly like you would see it in Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook,” Suzie Cardwell, News’ GM of Client Product & Strategy, said. “It’s lift and shift – because it is that.” 

Reach boost 

‘Social display’ is not a new ad format. But TikTok’s rise is fuelling a wave of brands leveraging their social creative across multiple channels. oOh! Media is aiming to take a slice of social budgets by enabling social ad formats to play across 9,000 of its portrait format panels.

Connected TV is next – brands will soon be able to place an influencer’s content as a pre-roll ad on a broadcast video on demand (BVOD) platform. In the meantime, posts and content from social platforms in premium publisher ad spots are often performing better than boosting or promoting posts within the social network itself.

“One of the things we’ve been focusing on is trying to provide those alternatives to the social platforms. We know advertisers are looking for those, we can quickly and easily facilitate it for them. They don’t need to rethink it. They just need to book a display campaign. We can activate those social posts on those environments,” Cardwell said. Social platforms are getting more expensive – US firm Tinuiti found while Facebook’s average CPM dropped 20 per cent in Q3, Instagram’s rose by 17 per cent. Facebook’s were up 16 per cent over two years, while Instagram’s were up 55 per cent. Over the pandemic, digital ad prices rocketed upwards. 

“There’s very little visibility on social costs. What we hear is that the costs have increased considerably as a result of not having effective tracking from iOS anymore and some of the limitations they’re seeing in getting incremental audience reach particularly in Facebook as engagement levels drop there,” Cardwell said. “We believe we are highly cost competitive.”

Fabulate, founded by former Nine execs Ben Gunn and Nathan Powell, with Toby Kennett and Sachin Singh, has built InfluencerAmp, a platform that lets brands place influencer content in premium environments.

Gunn disputed claims that targeting people via premium publishers is necessarily cheaper than targeting people on social, but cited higher view times, cheaper video views and new audiences. 

“We might win on some metrics, we'll lose on others,” Gunn said. "But if it's not cost efficient, if it's not effective, if it's not doing high engagement time, people aren't going to use it.”

Winterbourn rejected the notion that publishers running creator content in ad spots is a net negative for social platforms like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, and TikTok. “If it’s complementing the likes of TikTok and generating new audiences for the platform, how much is that worth to TikTok?” she said.

Meanwhile, it reduces costs for brands – because they can reuse content and save on production costs, while creator fees are “increasing dramatically”, Winterbourn said.

Wider impact 

Gavin Merwood, APAC GM at Nova, the tech firm behind News Corp and Fabulate’s products, said publishers are gaining traction because behaviour is different on their sites, and ads more likely to land.

“Scroll speed is fast on Facebook. Recollection of what you see is, let’s say, blurred. It’s slower in premium articles,” per Merwood. “Plus, as social networks have become more political, that scares brands sometimes. They want to take control."

He thinks the upshot  of longer dwell times within more premium publisher settings is that brands may now start to refocus on quality of creative over uber-targeted ads, which should have broader networks effects.

“We spent the past 10 years worrying about data and targeting,” he added. “The next five years will be creative.”