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

June ’19: less betting (despite the World Cup), even more focus on societal issues

Summer is here, and with increased heat, activity on the Swedish true native market has cooled down a notch. During June, we saw around 270 native articles by ca. 120 advertisers on the sites we track. More than every fourth advertiser chose to run sponsored articles on a minimum of two sites, or even a network like SUNT.

The most popular topics this month were Business & Finance, Technology & Computing (driven by campaigns around mobile phones / surfing, a new TV model and solar cells) as well as Society (a non-IAB category introduced by us to capture e.g. articles covering sustainability topics).

While we saw a higher number of Betting, Gambling & Lottery articles in the last two months, this topic and LeoVegas as one of the key brands have taken a step back again. The top 10 is almost entirely ”renewed”, with Ozoneair leading the list of most active brands in the true native market. Both they and EOn in the second spot have been very active for a number of months now.

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More than half of this month’s ”newcomers” are brands that had run native before and have restarted their activity his month.

Worth a special mention are probably major global sports brand Adidas, the ”travelling” Lollapalooza festival that debuted in Stockholm this year and the Swedish Military (Försvarsmakten).

Adidas was running sponsored articles related to the female World Cup, as they are the official material supplier.

Similar to the Swedish Police (Polisen) – who ran a few native articles e.g. during May, Försvarsmakten is focusing their native advertising activities mostly on employer branding.

Other campaign highlights

EOn was seen communicating with native articles beyond the topic of solar cells and more broadly on sustainability and energy efficency

Despite (or maybe because?) of their Google/Android ”ban”, Huawei continued to run their native campaign during June. Some articles focused on their phone and e.g. camera technology, while others featured known persons like Sarah Sjöström.

A short first recap of the first 6 months in 2019

We’ve started crunching some numbers on the total of over 1 500 native articles we’ve tracked during the first half-year of 2019. Below is a first summary of the most frequent topics in the Swedish true native market, and what brands were most active within each.

As in 2018, Business & Finance remains the most frequent key native topic. This is partially due to the fact that we have a number of niche business sites included in our list of sites we watch native activity on. But also that in many campaigns that center around other topics, a business aspect is added as well. and we tag each article we track with up to 3 different key topics.

E.g. an article titled ”This is how car brand X keeps the EU’s climate goals” would be tagged with Business & Finance (because it describes a business/operational strategy), Automotive (because of the industry focus) and Society (for the sustainability aspect).

Telia was most active in the Business & Finance category, focusing on smart home and workplace topics among others. Runner-up Bring ran native articles on the topics of sustainable e-commerce and transportation/logistics, and Collector Bank partially on B2B e-commerce as well as financial KPIs for businesses.

Automotive was a very popular topic in true native during the last months, and has risen to a second place. Volvo is new among the top 3 most active car brands, while Renault and KIA were already among them during 2018.

Technology & Computing was the third most frequent topic covered in sponsored articles during the first months of 2019. This was mainly driven by brands like Huawei pushing for their mobile phone models, but also Vattenfall and EOn that mostly advertised the benefits of solar panels.