Dive Brief:
- Facebook will soon start more clearly marking sponsored Instant Articles as branded content, according to Marketing Land.
- Branded content will include a brand logo in the byline to make users aware they are reading sponsored content, while also giving marketers a greater amount of brand awareness.
- The moves, which include changes to colors, text styles and spacing in sponsored content, give brands more control over the native ads while ensuring transparency for the reader.
Dive Insight:
In a bid to provide consumers with more valuable content and less intrusive ads in recent years, platforms have rolled out native ad options and publishers launched branded content studios. But these formats have blurred the line between branded and editorial content, and Facebook now hopes to better distinguish between those two types of content with this latest move.
Facebook launched Instant Articles — its in-app reading experience — in May 2015, and rolled it out to all publishers in April 2016. The app has been something of a work in progress in terms of advertising: Last December, Facebook revamped ads on the app by increasing the number and type of ads publishers could run on the app. The latest move, which gives marketers more branding on native ad content, should provide greater clarity to consumers on what content is an ad and what isn't.
“In the markup for an article, if a publisher identifies the third party product, brand, or sponsor featured in the article, we will automatically pull the marketer’s logo from the profile photo of their Facebook Page and insert it next to the Instant Article’s byline," Facebook's Josh Roberts and Andy Mitchell wrote n a blog post about the new “marketer logo” feature. "The logo will appear on the left-hand side of the byline, below the title. This feature will be available late June 2016.”