How Readpeak used Lucid Measurement by Cint to prove the value of their native advertising

Introduction

Blake Seabrook is UK country manager at Readpeak, a premium programmatic native platform that specializes in delivering high-quality native advertising solutions. 

They partner with top-tier publishers and work with leading agencies and brands across Europe and globally.

Readpeak operates in the context of an ad-saturated world. “Part of our story is that an everyday consumer is continually bombarded with sales messaging as soon as they wake up in the morning, and that doesn’t stop until you go to sleep and look at that last social media post and you see your final advert that you’re being sold to,” says Seabrook. 

“What we’re trying to do is actually ensure that users have a better experience. Because we know consumers actively seek out quality content, we place brands within that environment – creating engagement that feels natural rather than forced.”

Challenge

Before partnering with Cint, Readpeak faced a critical challenge in demonstrating the tangible impact of its unique native advertising approach. 

A key driver for finding a new solution was striking up a deal with a leading producer and provider of audio technology.

“We had already agreed to deal with the customer. So I was in a scenario where I had to find something and I had to find it quickly.” 

Readpeak’s contextual content-driven native advertising strategy was new territory for the audio customer, and as such, Readpeak was eager to be able to prove that their approach would yield results for the brand.

Their previous measurement partner proved unscalable for programmatic needs: “finding out very quickly that for programmatic, if we wanted to run something, it wasn’t very scalable.”

Solution

Seabrook’s search led him to Cint, and more specifically to Lucid Measurement, our analytics product for measuring in-flight advertising outcomes. 

Despite the initial learning curve, Readpeak swiftly adopted Cint’s solution, driven in part by the strong support that they received. Seabrook talks about an early call with Cint and how, “I knew very quickly after that first call that this was the right move and that Cint would be the right partner for this setup”.

He acknowledges that while there may have been some initial teething issues, “the service has been fantastic, communication has been fantastic. And I think that’s why we’re all so keen to do more with Cint.”

Seabrook praises the “ease of use within the platform,” and what he describes as Readpeak’s “ability to get the data very quickly, and share that with the client and with the agency,” as plus points for working with Cint. 

Being able to demonstrate the results of the campaign in-flight with Lucid Measurement gave Seabrook the proof points that he needed to instill confidence in Readpeak’s methodology, which meant that their audio storytelling customer was enthusiastic to begin planning their next campaign before the first had even wrapped.

Benefits

1. Enhanced client insights and audience understanding

Working with Cint enabled Readpeak to deliver unexpected and valuable audience insights to the customer. As Seabrook notes, “We’ve found some really interesting metrics off the back of it… I think we predicted that male audiences would engage with certain content more. And actually, that hasn’t always been the case.”

While Readpeak did indeed resonate well with men – with Brand Awareness, Ad Recall, and Brand Consideration among men all showing lifts over 10% in response to Readpeak’s campaign – the campaign also performed more than 2x above benchmark for Brand Awareness and Brand Favorability among women using mobile devices.

In Seabrook’s words, having access to those insights allows Readpeak to tell clients that, “Actually, there’s this audience that you haven’t ever thought about. And actually what it allows us to do for future campaigns is maybe create content suited to that audience that sits outside the core.”

2. Streamlined data sharing and transparency

The ease of obtaining and sharing data from Cint’s platform significantly boosted Readpeak’s transparency with clients. Seabrook states that, “Sharing data quickly, easily in a simple to easy to read format that is understandable is more valuable than you might think, and we take it for granted sometimes.”

Results and conclusion

The collaboration with Cint proved highly successful, particularly with the campaign for their aforementioned customer. Seabrook reports, “We’ve added real value to them. And we’ve got data not only within our platform to back it up, but within the SEM platform as well.” The results were so positive that Seabrook found his initial concerns “squashed very quickly, to be honest with you.”

The partnership has also raised the question of how best to think about the mid-funnel, something that can occasionally be dismissed as “messy”. The study showed the opposite — strong storytelling and high-quality content has the power to turn the middle into what might just be the most valuable part of the journey.

The results spoke for themselves. Brand awareness was up, brand intent was up, brand consideration was up, brand attributes were up, and so was ad recall. Working with Readpeak and Cint shows that the mid-funnel can be measured and measured in a way that drives real outcomes.

Seabrook goes on to say that working with Cint has “been a pleasurable experience. There’s no doubt about it. We will work with each other again… The fact that it’s been so good, the results have been great as well. Again, it makes us think actually there’s probably more to this than just a couple of tests.”