We’re tracking native content teasers on over 20 of the bigger Swedish websites. These are our key stats from March 2020.
March: continued growth, but also a certain ”Corona effect”
During March, true native advertising activity in Sweden further intensified – despite the parallell increased market turbulence caused by the Coronavirus pandemic.
In total, we tracked 320 articles from 160 advertisers. This is up almost 15% from February and also higher than March 2019. That year-over-year comparison is however not as easy since we’ve added sites to our tracking since then, and also refined its precision.
Trending topics this month were especially Personal Finance and Home & Garden. This is due to a combination of these categories always becoming more active during spring, but especially with Personal Finance there is also a slight ”Coronavirus effect”.
Meaning a number of articles we saw during March that were specifically related to the ongoing pandemic and its effect on the economy and people’s personal finances. In total, we counted 26 articles (ca. 8% of all articles in the month) that were relatively directly related to the pandemic and its current effects.
Overall, our reflection is that there is a limited negative ”Corona effect” so far. Of course categories such as Travel saw a very low native advertising activity in March (4 articles). But at the same time, this seems to have been compensated at least to some extent by increased activity in other categories so far. It will be interesting to follow what happens in the coming weeks, not only with native but the overall market of course.
Most active brands and newcomers
The brands running most sponsored articles in March 2020 were Jaguar, Årets Eldsjäl (Folkspel) and Electrolux.
As has become tradition, there was again a high ”turnover” in the top 10: besides Jaguar, all brands this month were new to the list.
In addition, almost 100 brands (re)started running true native advertising in March. Among them were a few of the brands from the top 10 list above such as Electrolux, Stockfiller and Fondia. It will be interesting to see which of them will stay more active also in the coming weeks.
Selected campaign highlights
An interesting ”prepper” take by Naturkompaniet, probably timed to the current circumstances
We don’t know if this was timed to the current situation or not, but surely Spotify attracted the interested of many readers with their music tips, as people spend more and more time with Music & Video streaming services at home currently
Skandia was running a number of natives recently, some of which were focused around equality in the workplace and career tips for women
We saw Fashion brand Esprit running a sponsored article not on their products or styles – but also economic and workplace equality
And finally, Schibsted practicing what they preach (and sell 🙂 – using sponsored articles to inform about the group’s new food video channel Godare
Missing any interesting example or want us to highlight your campaign? Get in touch 🙂
