True Native Content Sweden – April 2019

We’re tracking native content teasers on over 20 of the bigger Swedish websites. These are our key stats from April 2019.

April ’19: 40% higher activity, and more betting-related content

Real spring vibes hit the country and its native advertisers during the last month. Activity has increased significantly, with almost 350 articles from over 160 brands.

As last month, 30% of advertisers (representing over 40% of articles) ran native articles on several publisher sites or a network of sites.

One topic that has been the subject of much discussion in the Swedish advertising industry the last weeks and months has also been growing in importance in the native market: betting and gambling. In April, online casino brand LeoVegas was one of the most active brands, leading the top 10 together with Telia based on the activity we’ve tracked.

LeoVegas was mainly running video-based natives, explaining rules and tactics around different casino games. But a number of other brands from the sector – including Betsson and SveaCasino – have run native articles recently, and betting-related articles were already at place 7 of the most frequent native topics in April.

Mekonomen is one of the few brands that ran native for the first time in our tracking and also made it to the top 10 in the same month. Also Huawei joined the list of most active brands, using native as one of the channels for their campaign with Zara Larsson and Sarah Sjöström that was discussed in industry media.

With increased true native content activity in general, also the list of brands that (re)started using native as a communications channel grew again, to almost 100 brands.

As in previous months, most of the top advertisers on this list had already run natives a couple of months ago.

One of the restarters was Samsung, who ran a sponsored article that caught our attention: apparently, the brand created a service that lets people ”date” based on photos of what they have in their fridge. An interesting and funny communications angle to promote their ”smart” fridge range.

Other campaign highlights: more sustainability angles

Last month, we’ve already highlighted some interesting angles to the sustainability topic. An issue that is very present in media and the public discussion of course, and equally so a frequent topic in native content campaigns. Here are a few more examples of sponsored articles run by brands of different sectors during April:

Fashion: Fortum on Metro Mode about the future use of biomaterial for clothing

Home & Garden: Yes on Femina on reducing our everyday use of plastics

Travel: KLM on Omni about their measures to work towards more sustainable air travel