Gawker’s Brand Studio on The Strength and Future of Sponsored Content

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Enjoying the branded content you create is vital.

As part of our Ask the Experts series, we’ve been learning from the world’s leaders in content marketing and sharing their advice. In this interview, Paul Sundue, Executive Director of Gawker’s branded content lab, Studio@Gawker, chats with us about branded content partnerships and the future of native publishing.

Pressboard: What’s your background and what first attracted you to the branded content space?

Paul: My career has been equal parts creativity, technology, and advertising strategy. Prior to my current engagement running Gawker Media’s creative agency, I managed the digital practice at DDB’s flagship office in New York for 7 years. Prior to that, I worked in leadership positions at smaller digital shops, including a digital-video startup near Boston.

Branded content represents the natural evolution of marketing, beyond the traditional model of ‘interruption-based’ attention. The opportunity to help develop the cutting edge of this medium on behalf of some of the world’s most-beloved brands was too good to pass up.

The Disgustings – a partnership between Gawker and Hulu

Pressboard: What’s the main reason brands come to Gawker to partner on branded content, instead of creating and distributing the content themselves?

Paul: Brands partner with Studio@Gawker for efficacy and creative prowess. The marriage of reach and meaningful engagement makes for a powerful combination. When we create interesting branded content that is authentic to our tone of voice and run it across our media platforms that boast 100MM monthly uniques, our readers engage. To the tune of a 2.5% click-through rate, 2:30 time on page, and 80 comments per story, on average. On the rare occasions we run generic ‘off the shelf’ creative, it performs to a fraction of that level.

Gawker is well known for reader engagement, especially through commenting.  How do you measure this engagement and report it back to the brand?

We provide content engagement benchmarks across a variety of metrics, and provide actualized campaign data to our brand partners, with a direct comparison to those benchmarks.  Data points include article views, time on page, social shares, and number of comments.  We also select particularly notable or interesting comments and provide these in a report.  In some cases, we engage with particularly thoughtful commenters in order to learn more about their opinions and foster a continuing dialogue. 

Gawker custom content created with National Geographic Channel

How do you (or the brand) monitor and respond to both the positive and negative comments on the content?

The proprietary Kinja Content Management platform which powers our sites enables us to moderate comments before promoting them ‘live’.  While we strongly encourage thoughtful discourse, both positive and negative — our ability to depreciate empty vitriol disincentives overly negative behavior.
We love our comments and consider the intelligence and wit of our energetic community to be one of the most impactful differentiators of our sites. Our writers leap right in and join the conversation when appropriate, highlighting thoughtful points made by our commenters, and facilitating a rich dialogue.

Which will have the most profound effect (either negative or positive) on native/branded content in the next 12 months?

• Facebook’s Instant Articles
• The growth of Ad Blocking
• The FTC’s guidelines on native content disclosure
• Other?

The notion of disaggregated content, decoupled from media properties and distributed via other platforms is really interesting from a content marketing perspective. When content is distributed through multiple platforms, and mixed into a heterogeneous ‘newsfeed’ such as Facebook Instant Articles, Google AMP,  Twitter or Apple News — then how is that material ‘native’ to a particular media entity?  We as marketers gain considerable reach but lose some individuality, creative character and, potentially, effectiveness.  It’s an interesting trade-off.

An Instant Article published by Gawker, as denoted by the lightning bolt symbol at the top right.

In 140 characters or less, what is your favorite tip for creating great content?

Be objective. Take a step back. If you don’t want to read or watch your branded content, then there is no way that your audience will.

Pressboard would like to thank Paul Sundue and Studio@Gawker for speaking with us and contributing to our latest e-book. You can find them on Twitter at @StudioAtGawker.