Remember timeliness is key with native advertising. So an article is most effective when it's first written. In general, consumers love and prefer to read content that's brand new. This implies that coverage is up-to-date and therefore they're most accurate. How do we catch content the moment it happens? Let's take a look at some common tools that do just that. One thing we could do is simply check Google News. Google News is the leading news index or for news content. Do they ingest every blog post from every blog in the world? No, but I'm confident through my research that Google News data ingests a large vast majority of online news content. From small blogs with thousands of page views to the New York Times, it's all in Google News. Odds are if it's a source that we want to use in a native ad campaign, Google is going to know about it. So I did a search for Ozo. What do I see here? We learned quickly that there are other brands associated by the name Ozo as well as other references to weird things that have nothing to do with coffee. So let's enhance it. It's hard to imagine a scenario where Ozo is going to be mentioned without the word coffee. So let's go ahead and narrow down that term. This is pretty good. Ozo coffee is unique. So building a search query on Google was as easy as typing out the brand name. For more ambiguous brand names or company names, consider using and excluding words that will help remove the ambiguity. It just so happens that there is an Ozo audio and if you scroll through about 25 of these results, you'll see a few associated with the audio company. We can easily fix that by adding an exclusion term, here the word audio. No change in the first page here but after scrolling through the first view, we can see that there's nothing erroneous in our search results. This is just going to save us time in the long run by not looking at articles that have nothing to do with our brand. So let's take a look at whether now we should actually include these articles in our native ad campaigns. Let's take a look at this first one. Looking promising from the title perhaps a review of premium coffee shops. A big factor on whether we promote this ad all depends on the business objective. If we're trying to drive coffee bag sales on and offline, this isn't the article to promote. This doesn't directly talk about coffee and it doesn't even link to Ozo's website. In fact, this article barely mentioned Ozo at all. Native is about educating and inspiring readers to become customers. This article falls short here. At any rate if this partnership is something we really want to drive, we have to consider what a reasonable consumer action might be as a result of seeing this ad. Because this coffee ice cream combo can be bought locally, if we're going to use this ad, we're going to want to be sure to target it only to the Boulder County area. Let's take a look at some local sites to see if there are places where we could reasonably place our native ad. Do Boulder news sites have native content? After looking around for just two seconds I find one right on the front page of my first website that I'd like to advertise on. Great, we can place native ads right in the form of suggested stories on the front page of the Daily Camera. What about the Longmont Times- Call? Yes, the site looks identical. So identical that I'm fairly sure that they're being driven by the same type of website theme even. One more time. This time let's go to the biggest outlet with the highest possible reach, the Denver Post. Yes, it's there too. So great. There are native ads on all these sites. How do we get our content in these spaces? Well, one neat industry initiative has taken off that takes the guesswork out of this. Let's dive into how we can use ads.txt to ensure that we're choosing the right native advertising platform. Inventory fraud is common in the digital ad world including native. Imagine if I was an advertising platform or a company that provides inventory to a data of advertising platform. I'd have an incentive to overstate the number, types in names of websites that I'm able to place advertising on. Imagine if I'm an advertiser, take a big brand such as Apple. Apple knows it wants to advertise natively on top to your publishers like the New York Times. I found an advertising platform, I might feel the need to tell people like Apple that I deliver ads to the newyorktimes.com regardless of whether I can actually make it happen or not. The advertising supply industry responded. Publishers didn't want to be associated with ad platforms that were over-promising with the real potential to under-deliver. They had a clever idea. Let's make a little text file on my website that simply lists out the advertisers that I have deals with. That way, anyone can easily check before they buy to make sure that they're going to get an ad that actually can be placed on my website. So it's probably a good idea to check this a little bit before we actually select our native advertising vendor. There's a good bit to ads.txt if you want to learn more, see the link here. In the broadest sense, this text file is a list of all the advertising platforms that are able to advertise on any given website. If you go to denvepost.com, you'll see a long line of advertisers. If you're thinking of a native platform like the one off the list from the previous lecture, go to a few websites where you'd like your native content to show up and search for that platform. We here at Colorado about nativo and taboola. They just so happen to show up on all three of the websites were interested in, our local news sites, The Daily Camera, the Longmont Times-Call and the Denver Post. That to me gives me the broadest sense that I'm probably okay to go with either platform.
