Fresh native advertising guidelines at Condé Nast will make brands more competitive, says executive Elizabeth Line
Condé Nast’s editorial and commercial policies have had to change to keep publications competitive in the native advertising field, according to Condé Nast’s executive director of activation, marketing solutions Elizabeth Line following the release of new editorial guidelines.
Comments: Elizabeth Line
Line, who is also director of The Studio at Condé Nast, the digital division which produces digital creative solutions for advertisers, told The Drum after a Brand Perfect event in London that native advertising was already a “huge” driver of revenue and a recent shake-up of guidelines had led to editors “taking a step back” on the editorial versus advertorial issue.
“We just released new editorial guidelines about a week ago that blur the line a bit more between what we can do editorially,” she said. “Condé Nast still does not allow editors to endorse or get paid to write about an advertising product or service, but we can start doing custom content through our marketing teams that feels much more editorial.
“I think the editors are taking a step back a bit when it comes to what they’ll approve. There’s definitely been a need, and I think Condé is one of the more conservative publishing companies when it comes to that sort of thing.
“With the advent of networks like Glam and blog networks that don’t care as much or have as much rigour applied to the line between editorial and ad, we’ve had to change the policies so that we’re able to be competitive.”
However, while Condé Nast - which owns publications such as Glamour, Vanity Fair, Vogue and Wired - is embracing native advertising, Line added that the production of commercial content is still kept separate from editorial teams.
“The editors have approval, control on what we do, but we don’t leverage editors on our masthead to write promotional copy or content for advertisers,” she said.
“We can leverage bloggers or freelancers who have interacted with or written for the magazines in the past so they really understand the brand voice. We’ve also hired people that used to work on editorial teams across the portfiolio to work on our marketing solutions group so they have a very deep, intimate understanding of what the brand aesthetic and voice sound like so they can write branded or promotional content that feels very synergistic with the editorial stuff.”
According to Line - who works primarily on domestic US brands, although she said she’d like to work more closely with UK clients - native advertising and digital advertising solutions such as programmatic trading have prompted a fundamental shift in the media landscape for publishers, agencies and brands, and roles will continue to change.
“The roles all companies and teams are used to playing have started to change already,” she said. “I think the traditional role of media buying will change, just based on things like real-time bidding and programmatic. It takes the need for the person out, although that’s not to say there won’t be a need for some kind of manual intervention.
“It’s similar to the way as a creative agency we are thinking about how to create dynamic content based on the programmatic space. I think agencies and media buyers will have to figure out what roles to play.”
Key recent native advertising efforts from Condé Nast have included the creation of a publication called The Connective for Cisco in conjunction with Wired, a crowd-sourced tablet magazine put together within 48 hours.