We’re tracking native content teasers on over 20 of the bigger Swedish websites. These are our key stats from october 2019.
October 2019:
In our tracking, we identified around 350 sponsored articles from just under 170 brands. A bigger part of the growth was driven by the Personal Finance category – with Skandia and AMF Fonder, 2 of the top 3 most active advertisers were running articles in that category. And with Klarna, Svensk Hypotekspension and Lendify half of the top 10 were running articles on either savings/investing or borrowing topics.
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As several times before, our top 10 list of most active brands is entirely new, indicating a continued high activity across the board. There don’t seem to be any clear ”lighthouse brands” in the market currently like we saw last year and 2017. I.e. 1-2 brands that run a high number of native articles on different sites and over a longer period of time. This is probably a sign of the market maturing and also driven by the fact that more and more brands are testing and intensifying their native activity over time.
Besides Personal Finance, also Technology & Computing was clearly one of the trending topics in October. We wouldn’t be surprised if this continued throughout November as part of the ramp-up towards Black Friday. Despite native not being a primarily conversion-oriented format, we still saw numerous Black Friday related natives last year.
Around 90 new brands took up native activity during october
This is clearly below the ca. 120 brands who (re)started running true native in september. But at the same time, it is still a rather high number – around half of all active brands this month. Of the 10 new or re-starters with the most native articles, only one brand was entirely ”new” to the market: Matsmart. All other brands had – according to our tracking – been active at some point earlier.
Four of the 10 most active newcomers ran Personal Finance related articles. Also one charitable organization – Plan International – made it on the list, likely to be followed by a number of other brands from that segment as we approach one of the main seasons for charity.
It was especially interesting to see SvD Företag running native ads raising awareness around fake news and media related issues in education. Great to see media houses ”walk the talk”, i.e. using the effective native format themselves, as we’ve seen in a few earlier monthly analyses too.
Other interesting native campaigns
Volvo Cars is not only running native articles focusing on their cars and technology, but also uses native to highlight a scholarship they work with
Svenska Skogen is using native articles to inform and remind about the power and role of the Swedish forest in various areas, including of course the environment and CO2 balancing
Ericsson was running several articles informing about different technologies such as AI and their impact on society
