News Corp boosts brand engagement 8X by turning social posts into digital ads

Brief:

News Corp Australia boosted ad engagement by using a technology that lets brands reformat their social media ads for websites, such as those for its Herald Sun and Australian newspapers. The company exclusively collaborated with format management platform Polar to transform social media posts into digital ads, per a release the company shared with Mobile Marketer.
Amazon, Tommy Hilfiger, Chemist Warehouse, Sanitarium, Latitude Financial and Australia Post are among the brands that have run more than 100 campaigns using Polar's social display technology on News Corp Australia websites. The publisher integrated Polar technology with its data platform, News Connect, that has more than 2,000 audience segments for ad targeting.
The reformatted social ads saw engagement levels that were eight times higher than for standard display ad formats, Polar said. More than 1,500 advertisers have run 4,000 campaigns using the firm's technology this year, according to its announcement.

Insight:

News Corp Australia's adoption of Polar's platform aims to give brands and ad agencies that focus their efforts on social media an easier way to repurpose their creative for display advertising purposes. Automated reformatting helps to cut down on the cost of creating new ads, which can become a hindrance as more media spending shifts to programmatic platforms.

"With the current concentration of spend on social platforms, what we have seen is that brands don't have the time, budget or patience to build new creatives for the web," Kunal Gupta, CEO of Polar, said in a statement.

For News Corp Australia, the formatting platform can help to compete more effectively with social media rivals while touting its ability to deliver ads to audiences in a brand-safe environment. Brand safety issues have dogged social media platforms like YouTube, which has faced several advertiser boycotts over ad placements next to objectionable content. Facebook recently started testing publisher whitelists for its Audience Network, which places ads on third-party sites, and in-stream ads, as part of its effort to address brand safety concerns, Digiday reported.

Global ad spend on social media this year will overtake print media for the first time worldwide, per Publicis-owned media agency Zenith. The firm predicted spending on social media will jump 20% to $84 billion this year, while newspaper and magazine spending will fall 6% to $69 billion. That shift pressures print publishers to adapt their websites to compete more effectively with social media rivals.