At Socius we believe in brands as storytellers. What we are working to achieve with our latest product Socius Native is to fundamentally change the broken and blocked ad “creative” that’s delivered to publishers websites.

Most banner ads today suck. No one likes to see them, much less produce them. In my past life I spent many an evening working in creative agencies slicing up images to be spewed out onto various web spaces to be ignored and blocked. This is not an occupation worth rescuing.

“The social web is one big scrap heap of content waiting to be mined”.

When I worked on the global rebrand of Adidas the imagery shifted drastically from glossy composed imagery, to raw, authentic, out of focus energy. This shift was directly inspired by the way we as consumers engage with the brands we love which is through the power of real life influencers and recommendations via User Generated Content (UGC) on social networks. According to the social media agency Laundry Service, UGC increases conversions by 25%.

Adidas “all in” Campaign from around 2010

Since then influencer marketing has exploded.

“84% of marketers said they would launch at least one influencer campaign within the next twelve months.” — eMarketer

Influencers are today’s micro agency and publisher in one; producing and distributing a daily dose of lifestyle. However, this content will struggle to be more than just another post in the feed. According to Instagram in 2016 up to 70% of the news feed was never even seen, they then changed the newsfeed algorithmically to no longer order it chronologically which had an adverse affect on brands timing their product launches. Brands are effectively being held to random to make sure their “followers” are notified of new stuff.

As Europeans we believe in recycling and as entrepreneurs we see gold in other’s waste. The social web is one big scrap heap of content waiting to be mined. At Socius we believe that the power of this content lies in releasing it from each network’s walled garden and connecting it in context to create an authentic holistic brand story.

$250B ad dollars are set to flood from traditional media — print and TV into digital.

Now lets look to the traditional publisher. 85%+ of new digital ad spend has been sucked out to Google and Facebook. Thankfully this was the first wave of ad dollars and were for direct response advertising i.e.“buy my product”. The next wave of ad dollars set to flood into digital from TV and print amounts to $250B in the US alone and these are branding dollars i.e “buy my lifestyle”. Bloombergs’s CEO Justin B Smith’s Survival Guide For The platform Era outlined the opportunities in playing on the publishers strengths. Native is a perfect vehicle for branding dollars and publishers were built for it since they can truly provide context as storytellers themselves. Scaling native however is not so easy.

Over the last few years publishers everywhere have been opening their own in-house creative studios. These content studios are competing with the traditional agencies, combing the skills of their more commercially minded journalists with technologists to create …. yet more content! A very unscalable and low margins game for the publisher and limited to only top tier advertisers that can afford it.

Current “native ad tech solutions” generally analyse a brand’s sponsored article — the headline, the image, the body, and then in realtime they distribute it to hundreds of sites, adapting the unique look and layout to reflect the page where its hosted.

Today’s limited choices for advertising on a publisher’s site.

This creates a dilemma for many brands who’d love to get their existing branded content from images and videos infront of the publishers dedicated audiences but are only given the options of hosting a traditional banner ad, an article or high priced content studio creation.

Over the last 9 months since pilot launch what we’ve faced hasn’t been so much a technical challenge, we’re product people, with 3+ years directly in the social curation and display space, and we’ve already built a robust CMP to effortlessly pick and mix owned and earned media and export it as an ad to your ad server. Rather the hardest thing we’ve found to bring this product to market has been working to change behaviour and culture in the way ads are created and sold.

For success we need insider advocates, strategic advisors and continued funding to pursue the long game. If we get this combination right Socius Native will enable the next wave of branding ad dollars to not be sucked into the duopoly but be directed to the publishers who can truly provide context and freedom from the feed.

Thanks for reading!