[Product Update] Create Immersive User Experiences With Stories

Stories is an emerging ad format that provides immersive ad experiences. According to 99 Firms, the use of “stories” on social platforms experienced a 300% growth rate in under three years, topping 500 million active users a day. Advertisers looking to capitalize on the increase in vertical content consumption and stories ad formats were once relegated exclusively to walled gardens. Today, that’s no longer the case.

Stories, a vertical image and video format, inspires engagement and emotion with an immersive, full-screen visual experience. Nativo’s Stories offering fully integrates advertising and consumer content, allowing marketers to leverage existing social assets into native placements with CTA rates between 8-12%.

Stories distinguishes itself from other vertical formats due to its opt-in functionality, its focus on active user engagement and its scalability:

1. Stories features a unique opt-in functionality that requires a user to click a native ad in order to engage with content.
2. Due to this opt-in functionality, users are actively choosing to engage with brand content v. passively engaging with the same content on social platforms.
3. This instigation of active user engagement is easily scaled across hundreds of premium publications on the open web, where contextual targeting enables the delivery of the right brand content to the right people at the right time.

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Update Note: Nativo Stories is now available on both Mobile and Desktop and maintain the user-initiated functionality across devices.

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How Stories Work

The Stories format works like this:

• Users engage with native ads directly within contextually relevant publisher environments.
• Upon click, the story opens full-screen, offering distraction-free viewing of brand content.
• Each frame of the story auto-advances - 6 seconds for images, full length for video. Users spend 12 to 20 seconds engaging with Stories.
• Persistent CTAs drive traffic to an advertiser’s designated URL on every slide.

Users can navigate throughout the experience by tapping on the left and right side of the screen. Videos play on mute, allowing users to enable sound by clicking the sound icon. Once the story is complete, the ad will stop on the last frame and the user may close the story to return to a publication’s editorial environment. The story auto-closes if no user action is performed.

The Impact on Brands

Stories provides a new type of native experience for industries that require more visual representation. For example, marketers working in travel, entertainment, consumer packaged goods (CPG) and automotive can benefit from 100% visual content experiences to promote their products.

Not only does the format lend itself to the promotion of more visual products, it’s easy to launch. Social video and image assets can be repurposed into a Stories execution, creating highly engaging content rich with product and service information without the time investment usually associated with asset creation. Marketers can use Stories to refresh content for younger audiences used to similar experiences on social platforms, delivering vertical video in a time when 94% of users on mobile consume content vertically.

User Engagement and Scale

Stories captivate audiences with an immersive visual experience, making it a high-impact ad format that generates CTA rates between 8-12%. Currently, users spend 12 to 20 seconds engaging with Stories due to the auto-advancing nature of the format, with six seconds for each slide.

Stories is scalable across hundreds of premium publisher news feeds, with brand content distributed across contextually relevant editorial environments. The editorial context of the format promotes higher levels of engagement for advertisers, with readers already in a content consumption mindset when they encounter the execution. This format also offers significant added value in terms of user experience as consumers continue to interact with editorial content after their Stories experience ends.

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