What Happened
Popular recipe site Epicurious has revamped its mobile app to better integrate native ad units to offer a smoother user experience. The app, which was launched in 2009 and made Epicurious the first food publisher with a mobile app portal, previously supported banner ads and disruptive video ads. With this revamp, the Condé Nast-owned food publisher is getting rid of banner ads on mobile and adding sponsored content tiles that emulate the in-app designs for galleries and recipes. Epicurious is using custom content management system Copilot and a Google SDK to power the native ad experience.
What Brands Should Do
This revamp should help food-related brands reach their targeted audiences on the Epicurious app more effectively with branded or sponsored content. By improving its ad products, Epicurious is also doing its fans a favor by offering them a better app experience, which in turn should encourage app usage and user engagement.
As we pointed out in the Ad Avoidance section of our Outlook 2016, branded content serves as a good way to engage increasingly ad-avoidant consumers, and more brands should take note of the increasing number of native ad products available and explore their options in terms of finding the most suitable content creators and publishers to work with.
Source: AdExchange
Header image is a promotional image courtesy of www.epicurious.com