Inside Brightspot: Sponsored content

[Speaker 1] Sponsored content, an example of which we're looking at here can be any content which an advertiser has paid to have created and or promoted but remains otherwise consistent with the normal format of a publisher's editorial content while featuring some sort of brand promotion for the advertiser.

Almost any type of media, from articles to blog posts to photo galleries can be sponsored and can be engaging and successful when sponsored by a company or organization that aligns well with your core audience and discusses topics that align with your brand. And many publishers view it as less intrusive or disruptive than some types of traditional advertising, making it an extremely valuable monetization tool for a broad spectrum of publishers to be valuable.

However, sponsored content must be done in a way that makes it obvious to a publisher's audience that a piece of content has been sponsored and typically offers an explanation of what that means to a given publisher. In terms of any variability from their typical editorial guidelines.

And finally, sponsored content must be done in such a way that it can be efficiently executed by a publisher's organization integrated into the tools and workflows. They are already using less the burden of producing it become greater than its value to the publishers organization.

That's where Brightspot comes in. Brightspotcontent types, including articles, blog posts, listicles, live blogs and photo galleries are built to be seamlessly sponsored and to fit that sponsorship effortlessly into editorial content already being created and provide frictionless tools to make it extremely clear to your audience when content has been sponsored and what that means.

Let's look at how.

First let's create a sponsor—a Brightspot content type. Choose a logo which can be any image in Brightspot, provide a name and a description for your sponsor. These will be visible to your audience on any content using this sponsorship then provide a call to action, which is where anyone clicking on the sponsor's logo would be directed which can be on your site internal or go elsewhere, including the sponsor site. You can control how that link behaves and set additional attributes like a UTM code, for example. You can even translate the sponsor's description if you'd like.

Now let's apply that sponsor to a Brightspot article. Simply scroll down to the sponsor section below the body area and at it like you would any other Brightspot module.

Let's have a look in preview where you see the sponsored visual treatment and the sponsor's logo that clicks off to their site. You will also notice an optional "What does this mean?" link in the red sponsored bar that can link off to a post on your site or elsewhere, where you can explain your organization's policy around sponsored content or anything else you'd like to communicate to your audience about sponsored content on your site.

Finally, it's also important to see how that sponsored content will be displayed and labeled when promoted on your site. Let's look at an example list of promoted articles and see how a sponsored article is treated. You can see that a sponsored article is presented in a list of promoted articles almost exactly the same way as any other story is, except that it's always clearly labeled as sponsored, making it clear to your audience that the story has a sponsor and includes a clickable sponsor link, adding value for the advertising sponsor.

You'll see that even as you switch to different list styles, the sponsor treatment remains consistent so you can always be sure how it will appear on your site and how it will be presented to your users. Again, this works in almost exactly the same way across many other Brightspot content types—articles, posts, listicles, galleries and live blogs—and can be implemented without any developers or coding required and seamlessly integrated into your existing workflows.