News Corp has launched a native ad offering that includes social and video within editorial content.
It's part of News Corp Australia's innovation push that sees the publisher is taking steps to further understand native advertising and how editorial can work hand in hand with driving native brand experiences that work for both consumers and advertisers.
Mark Drasutis, head of innovation for News Corp Australia, told AdNews that the publisher is placing more of an editorial focus on commercialisation as well as engaging the consumer through story telling.
“We obviously are the experts in story telling in Australia, telling stories for advertisers as well as stories for our consumers, we have several initiatives underway where we look at really understanding native, really understanding how we can drive native brand experiences driven by storytelling,” he said.
The shifts in editorial focus have come about through disruption events, called News Foundry, the publisher is hosting internally.
The events bring together staff from across the business to attempt to solve challenges faced by the News as a whole. The last event held brought together editorial, technology, product, sales and marketing staff to look at problems faced by the editorial division.
From the event a piece published on the Adelaide Advertiser site, launched just six weeks after the idea was first floated at News Foundry.
The long form visual piece titled Australia's Great Adrenalin Rushes: 13 of the most extreme experiences, is sponsored by the Clipsal 500 Adelaide, with a contributor winning a V8 Supercar hot lap at the race.
Drasutis explained that the key behind News Foundry is to get people thinking in a different way, not necessarily coming up with outlandish new ideas.
“Basically what it is we have pieces of the jigsaw but no one was actually looking at the big picture – putting all these pieces together,” he said.
Drasutis said that this piece of content coming to fruition is part of the publishers on going efforts to undertake and test new revenue models.
“It's been a 12-18 month process of building the foundations correctly, changing the mindset of the approach and the methodologies used focusing on sustainable innovation rather than disruptive innovation,” he said.
“It's pretty powerful, it's taking the business of journey to a place where they are able to control there output, to ensure that it's relevant to what their customer wants and to the advertisers as well.”
Events like News Foundry allow the business to move more quickly to create innovative content, Drasutis said, citing The Australian's interactive obituary for Gough Whitlam yesterday (21 October) as as a further example.
“The content is available through an API and that now allows us to take it and combine it with other elements, we have a greater degree of flexibility around our video assets that we have before, how we integrate a social feed into our content feed, these tools are now in the hands of the editorial team for editorial to be able to use day to day.”
For more on News Foundry pick up the latest issue of AdNews Magazine (17 October) you can subscribe on iPad here or in print here.
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