The first native ads, for Dell, appeared on the New York Times' website last month. At the start of this month, the Washington Post's content marketing offering, BrandConnect, adopted the same long-form template used for regular editorial features, with PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry trade body, first to sign up.
Guardian Labs, launched at the start of the year, has more than 130 people dedicated to producing quality content that just happens to be funded by brands. They're going to find a willing audience, of course. The research continues to pour out to prove marketers' insatiable appetite for content marketing. Econsultancy, for instance, brought out its Marketing Budgets Report for 2014 recently, which found 74% of brands planning to increase spend this year.
