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UK Government SME Native Advertising

Department for Business Innovation and Skills reports 63% lift in brand awareness from native advertising

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By Ishbel Macleod, PR and social media consultant

June 6, 2014 | 3 min read

The UK Government’s Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) has reported a 63 per cent lift in brand awareness from a campaign using native advertising and rich content marketing.

BIS worked with media agency M4C and media company Martini, as it looked to increase confidence within the SME community that Britain is backing and supporting small businesses.

Traditionally, government ads utilise static display ad formats. However, M4C felt that this approach alone would not create a two-way conversation with the SME community. Research on native advertising has shown that when content from a publication is integrated into an ad unit, engagement can increase by as much as 33 per cent. As a result, M4C set out to explore the concept of native advertising and content marketing and to look at building relevant, useful content into ad units.

M4C approached Martini’s UK team to discuss how this strategy could work for BIS. Martini’s platform leverages insights from data gathered across its platform to help marketers reach their ideal audience in the right environment and in the most impactful way - in this case, professional business-minded audiences.Commenting on the campaign, BIS said that M4C and Martini have delivered on the brief of delivering an “innovative and exciting way to reach our very busy small business owner audience” in a “new and fresh way”, describing it as a “first for government advertising”. It also stated that the campaign “was certainly able to deliver content within relevant context for the end user”. The campaign saw links to relevant content displayed alongside brand advertising for BIS on website Entrepreneur.com.
To amplify branding and awareness for BIS in the third-party content, when users click on a headline for one of the integrated articles they are taken to Entrepreneur.com, where they can read the full featured article. These articles are surrounded by a display advertisement for BIS which subtly promotes the department and its campaign for SMEs while simultaneously providing readers with new, relevant and beneficial content.
UK Government SME Native Advertising

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