When you think about the biggest trends or buzzwords (depending on how you look at it) in advertising, Programmatic and Native are right at the top. They’re changing a ton of things. Everything from the economics of advertising and publishing to how brands actually engage with their audiences to what consumers expect in advertising.
So I’m particularly excited to announce that we’re bringing our native advertising product, Sponsored Comments, to the world of programmatic and we’re doing it on a global basis. Our launch partner is Xaxis, the programmatic media buying arm of WPP, and you can read the press release here. Starting today, Xaxis clients, which include some of the best brands in the world, will buy and place Sponsored Comments advertising across much of the Disqus network.
We launched Sponsored Comments back in April by running pilot campaigns with dozens of agencies and brands. If you haven’t seen one, they include brand content integrated into a Disqus comment that is featured above discussion threads on sites that use Disqus. Here’s what it looks like:
A Sponsored Comment can use all types of media to get the point across, just like any other Disqus comment. But they’re not part of the discussion happening on that page. Comments to the ad are driven to a separate landing page just for that ad. This keeps the core commenting experience uninterrupted and publisher communities just as they were. That’s the best of both worlds.
Since those pilots campaigns, we’ve been working on two key things: targeting and brand safety.
Targeting Over 1,000 Discussion Topics
With targeting, we know a ton about what readers are interested in because they’re talking about it on Disqus. So we’re applying semantic, keyword targeting at the discussion level with this product. We target against what the article or blog post is about, what the discussion includes – because sometimes the discussion forks into new topics – and what we know about that specific user as they visit various websites, many of which use Disqus (we are on over 3 million websites). That’s a unique targeting capability because we’re the only company with such a large footprint in comments.
It’s a new way of thinking about targeting and a more effective one I think. It sounds simple, but as an advertiser, you want to reach people that are interested in your product. There’s a difference between your hypothetical target audience and your actual product audience. In other words, the difference between what surveys might tell you versus what actual individual consumers are interested in.
For example: if you’re a CPG company trying to reach moms, you might target against women 25-35. However, doing that will get your message in front lots of single, childless women and you’ll also miss out on moms younger than 25 and older than 35. But if you target against people who are reading or commenting about family dinner recipes, diaper rash, schools, etc., you have a much higher probability of reaching your desired product buying audience.
Out of the gate, we’re able to target against over 1,000 topics and we can easily add new ones for specific brand needs or as new trends develop.
Managing Brand Safety with Every Comment
Advertisers want two things when it comes to brand safety for Sponsored Comments: 1) They want to be able to moderate comments that users leave to their Sponsored Comment and 2) they want to know their ad is running on a brand safe page – both the article content and the comments themselves.
The first one was easy: comments to Sponsored Comments are managed in a way similar to how many of our publishers manage their comments, too. This is different from Facebook and Twitter where we’ve all seen examples of brand discussions being taken over – in a negative way – by users and the advertiser has no control. Also, Disqus has long had the best tools to moderate comments with virtually any criteria that our publishers, or in this case brands, choose. So advertisers can filter out comments if a user reacts to the ad based on keywords and criteria that they set. It’s similar to how they would manage other social channels, but with more controls because of our commenting platform and all the tools we have there.
The second part of brand safety was more interesting and we soon realized this was really a bigger opportunity for us. Brands have advertising near comments sections all over the web with very little controls in place because no one has reach into as many comments sections as we do. What we’re able to do is to continually scan sites and comments for over 2,500 words and expressions for brand safety scoring by using the same technology we built for spam and profanity detection. We’re actually more brand safe than any other online advertising product because we are the only ones who include comments in our brand safety (and our comment market share is ~70% with 3 million sites using Disqus.)
In the coming weeks, we’ll share more about how we’re scaling our advertising business and the technology that’s behind it all.
If you’re interested in working with us, click Contact on the top header of this page.
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