The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) is also busy producing premium research and events for readers beside the main Economist.com brand – and giving marketers an opportunity to create their own, to boot.

“We’ve been doing content before content was popular,” The Economist content solutions unit MD Elena Sukacheva tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “With Economist Intelligence Unit, we publish a lot of research sponsored by mostly B2B companies.

“(Previously), it was very traditional forms of content – 7,000-word white papers that were often missing the vast majority of the audience; who has time to read 7,000 words?

“Instead of doing one massive paper, we break down the findings of the research in to multiple pieces and feed them through a social network, or create a content hub (for brands).”

Sukacheva was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology.  Please find more coverage from the conference here.

“As publishers get smarter in content recommendation, we’re able to better understand the business needs of publishers… and provide signals to our algorithm,” according to Outbrain global marketing VP Lisa LaCour.

“We’re helping our brand marketers get smarter and smarter about what kinds of content they should be producing based on what we’re seeing audiences click on and actually engage in.”

LaCour says Outbrain doesn’t just want to serve up bottom-of-the-page links – it is increasingly used to help publishers program their editorial index pages, too.

Recent unconfirmed reports claim that Outbrain plans to go public in New York with a valuation of $1bn. Rival Taboola recently raised $117mn in new funding, also reported to be a “pre-IPO” step.

We interviewed her earlier this week at the IAB Leadership Meeting.

Taboola is announcing a $117mn Series E round, led by Fidelity Management and Research Company along with previous backers Marker LLC and Steadfast Capital. But notable new investors are Condé Nast parent Advance Publications, Comcast Ventures, the chairman of Italian news publisher L’Espresso, Yahoo! Japan and Groupe Arnault, the majority shareholder of LVMH.

The new names suggest some backing from important publishing houses. Taboola already had a partnership with Yahoo! Japan. The amount dwarfs the total $50m Taboola had raised over five previous rounds since 2007.

Taboola is serving 6bn recommendations daily, is second to Google for audience reach according to comScore and is now seeing 50% of revenue from desktop clicks, CEO and founder Adam Singolda tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“For the first time, we’re seeing (some individual) advertisers spending more than $10mn a year with us. Native advertising reaches the entire (purchase) funnel.

“The thing that differentiates successful from non-successful brands is, those that … attach some sort of KPI success rate … are able to spend tens of millions of dollars. Those that are not are still stuck at marketing budgets … they’re testing.”

In this new article, Bloomberg examines the content marketing distribution space.

Singolda was interviewed by Furious Corp founder and CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat.

The Beet Retreat ’15 was sponsored by AOL and Videology. Please find additional videos from the event here.

“A lot of our best-performing stories have had video as part of them; many of them are multi-media,” Times advertising EVP Meredith Levien tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “The ones with video are absolutely out-performing everything else.”

Levien says the Times has clocked over 40 marketer campaigns under “Paid Posts”: “It was a big big growth business for us – it’s a big contributor to our digital ad growth this year.”

The program has mostly prompted buzz around Netflix’s Paid Post for its Orange Is The New Black show, a feature article about women in prison, the series’ own plot line. Campaigns since have been notched up for Holiday Inn and Cole Haan.

“What we’ve been able to prove in a year is that, even with very clear labelling (as sponsored), if a story is high-quality, we can get terrific engagement for it,” Levien adds.

We interviewed her at the MEC session at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Beet.TV coverage of CES 2015 is sponsored by Adobe Primetime. Find all our coverage here.

Tribune Media’s broadcast subsidiary Tribune Broadcasting, whose TV stations include KTLA of Los Angeles and WGN-TV of Chicago, is about to announce an exclusive partnership to feature sponsored content links paid for via Taboola, according to MediaPost.

That follows this week’s earlier deal in which magazine publisher Time Inc agreed to stop using multiple such content marketing platforms and go exclusively with rival Outbrain in a partnership which reportedly will earn the media house north of $100 million.

Taboola’s Tribune deal will see its units delivered on to 40 TV station sites and 80 mobile apps. In this interview recording from April’s Beet.TV Content Marketing Summit, sponsored by Taboola itself, Taboola CEO Adam Singolda says video can also be a delivery mechanism for sponsored links.

“There are profound opportunities for brands to drive action. We are going to start seeing brands capitalize and fully leverage that Vine canvas,” he says. “The challenge for Twitter is it’s live and in the moment, but they’ll have to figure that out.”

But measurement remains a hurdle for content marketing. “Our inability to consistently present sound findings and real business performance is holding us back. We need to figure out how to effectively measure emotion, engagement, attention, and connect those to business metrics.”

LaVecchia was one of  the speakers at the Beet.TV video advertising summit on “outstream” advertising presented by Ebuzzing & Teads. Please find more videos from that event here.

“Their expectations of brands are what they think people expect of them,” says Initiative’s US chief strategy officer Sarah Power. “They’re comfortable with brands trying to change who they are because, as a generation, that’s what they’re expected to do.”

One way a big brand is becoming this flexible is by partnering with AOL to start a “newsroom”, to make content that snags millennial males. Power says IPG client MillerCoors’ recently-announced “BrewPub Newsroom” initiative, to reach men aged 21 to 34, will see 400 pieces of content produced by three full-time social curators for the brewer. The scheme extends to video, through Aol’s HuffBros Live, an off-shoot of HuffPost Live for the target demographic.

“It goes beyond content production,” Power adds. MillerCoors is the official beer of Aol –
when they have events, they’re serving MillerCoors.”

We interviewed Power at the recent Beet.TV summit on branded content, where she was a speaker. You can find additional videos from the event here.

“The reason content is now so topical is, brands are increasingly looking for much more ROI,” MediaCom’s global MBA head James Morris tells Beet.TV.

“Content elevates itself over and above advertising. Advertising is still an important part of the mix – but it’s not the answer to every communications challenge.”

Morris helps devise content-led strategies including viral videos, blogger outreach and search engine optimisation for MediaCom clients.

He spoke with Beet.TV during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Please find more coverage of the festival here.

“The traditional inventory … haven’t really provided marketers the environment to tell a rich, engaging, robust story,” says Yahoo’s head of the Americas, Ned Brody.

“Unlike the small piece of real estate that typically is available in IAB units … this is an opportunity to tell a full story… and distribute that not only through Tumblr and (our) ‘magazines’ but our entire ecosystem on Yahoo.” Brody says Tumblr has seven content types available for marketers to use.

We spoke with him at the the Cannes Festival.  You can find more coverage of the festival here.

Update:  More on Yahoo’s use of Tumbr and other advertising efforts reported in the New York Times on June 21.

“We’ve rolled it out in the US and will roll it out in 2014 in many other markets around the world,” says Olivier Gers, global president of LiquidThread, another SMG initiative combining three SMG content-creating units.

“We have relationships with 20+ publishers in the US and South America, and we’ll establish more relationships in other markets as well – to establish the best of evergreen content and push that content within paid display in other markets.”

We spoke with Gers as part of our series titled “The Road to Cannes,” a preview of the Festival and an overview on the state and future of digital media by a range of thought leaders. The series will be published over four weeks.  The series is sponsored by Videology.

“There’s a collection of third-party data reporters in addition to first party,” Dario Spina tells Beet.TV. “There’s a lot of confusion on … the data results you want to report back. Are they relevant to your client? That has to settle – there needs to be some kind of fairly unified third-party reporting in order to effectively commerce from it.”

Spina says there has been a “shift” in which more brands, in marketing spend negotiations, start with asking publishers for creative content ideas. But: “There’s a lot of confusion … there’s a lot of data available – not everyone knows how to to turn that in to a content strategy.”

Spina was a panelist at the Beet.TV Content Marketing Summit, spososored by Taboola, held at the New York offices of Mindshare this week. He was interviewed by Collective Digital Studio strategy and sales SVP Paul Kontonis. You can find more videos from that event here.

Historically a solution to drive discovery and consumption for news publishers, Taboola is expanding its role with brands and advertisers who want to connect  with consumers, he explains.

Singolda was a speaker at the Beet.TV Content Marketing Summit hosted yesterday by Mindshare.

Disclaimer:  Yesterday’s event was sponsored by Taboola.

“No matter what … it’s got to be clear, consistent,” says Digitas’ north America media activation head Adam Shlachter. “It’s got to have a distinct voice and perspective and be something people not just watch but talk about, keep coming back to – that’s hard to do.”

The difficult truth about branded video is that there are no quick wins and scale is very hard to achieve. “Unfortunately, it’s a bespoke approach you have to take each time, which does limit the scale,” Shlachter adds. “There’s no one way to do it – if there was, it wouldn’t be effective.”

Shlachter was interviewed by TouchCast co-founder Erick Schonfeld at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat in Vieques, Puerto Rico.

“A brand could sponsor one of our bigger editorial offerings – Dealbook or Bits, 36 Hours, Corner Office,” says NYT video GM Rebecca Howard. “Those are bigger experiences that could have a video and a text component that could be brought to you by a single advertiser.

“One exciting thing that we’re launching at the end of April with the redesign of our video hub is going to be a branded playlist that can be populated by an advertiser’s content. Let’s say it’s a KitchenAid – we could put that on our food section, we can make content for them. It would be mixed in with everything else that we offer.”

But, Howard says, paid video marketing would be clearly signposted from editorial: “Just as that Dell piece of content was very well highlighted that it’s a piece of advertorial content, we would be doing the same thing for video.”

Howard was speaking with Beet.TV at the Beet Retreat executive retreat in Vieques, Puerto Rico.

That’s forcing the ad agencies to offer their services in these spaces. But, for agencies as used to the traditional church-and-state separation of these fields as are editors, these are strange new times.

“It’s important to create a relevant taxonomy about what you’re talking about,” says ad agency GroupM‘s chief global digital officer Rob Norman.

Content marketing also comes with contextual distribution challenges – when a branded article must be written in a news publisher’s tone of voice in order to resonate with readers, how can it scale across the web?

“It is relatively hard to get someone to write for The New York Times and then have that content distributed off The New York Times in to many many other places – you might argue you’ve lost some of the form and function by taking out of the Times and moving it along.”

Norman was a speaker at our Beet Retreat executive retreat in Vieques, Puerto Rico.

SMG’s new Content@Scale CMS, launched this week, ingests text articles and images from Ahalogy, Demand Media, Glam Media, Forbes, Martha Stewart Omnimedia, Parade, Rodale Inc. and Time, Inc, all of whom are happy to license the materials for re-use by brands anywhere.

“Traditional display campaigns were subject to the constraints of what could be placed within that (ad) unit for consumer to engage with,” SMG’s global digital, data and analytics president Lisa Weinstein tells Beet.TV.

“Can it only live with the publisher of the content? No. The truth is, Forbes content could end up running on any other publisher. That was something to be worked through.”

Gaining publishers’ agreement to turn their pages in to ads is certainly different. But that’s the place media are at in 2014.

In principle, Content@Scale, powered by Flite, sounds a little like a smaller version of NewsCred, the content marketing startup whose platform lets brands licence articles from around the world for marketing purposes.

Weinstein says her system is “real-time” but is best at giving marketers “evergreen” content: “If they created it yesterday or last month, it could have equal relevance to something a brand wants to associate with today.” It’s not clear if that means publishers are offering only archive content to marketers.

Content@Scale plans to include video for re-use later this year before expanding out of North America toward the end of the year.

The service lets marketers licence “evergreen” articles from 15 US publishers to re-use as content in display ad units.

Flite CEO Will Price, whose technology powers the service, says he aims to take it to the Spanish, Chinese, French and German markets later this year.

“We’ll add publishers that will represent those regions, crawl and index their text and image content,” Price tells Beet.TV. “We’re also working with some video sites to make the video content available as well.”

That would see videos originally conceived as editorial allowed to be re-used as marketing collateral. Branded content has become a hot topic in media land, as advertisers try to cut through digital noise and as publishers get alarmed by falling effectiveness and rates for the traditional at formats they sell.

Content@Scale may also become available to agencies other than Starcom. The platform has its roots in “AlwaysOn”, a project Flite serviced for Procter & Gamble, which wanted to reach consumers not just with pre-planned advertising creative but with content that responds to live news issues.

Content@Scale doesn’t just make publisher content available to marketers, it also lets them buy it in to an ad unit.

“It’s a content management system meeting an ad server,” Price says.

“We are going to give marketers a platform to publish their content on to the New York Times domain,” says Michael Zimbalist, NYT’s SVP of ad products and R&D. “It’s not off to the side in an advertising unit, it’s in the flow – but in a very unique distinct way so that it will never confuse a reader.”

“Sponsored content”, “branded content” or “native advertising” have lately been mooted as a win-win media funding model for marketers trying to stay ahead of the digital din and for publishers finding it harder to sell display ads whose effectiveness is falling.

Its redesign makes The New York Times the latest after Forbes, The Atlantic, Washington Post and others to offer the opportunity, which it’s calling “Paid Posts”.

Amongst the first customers is Dell. Each of its series of paid articles is laid out differently to the site’s in-house editorial so perhaps appears more clearly delineated than initiatives of similar publishers. Zimbalist says the Times, which many look to as a bastion of journalistic integrity, will be “super-, super-vigilant” about making the distinction.

“Native content that comes from brands might be text and images, might be video, might be data visualisation,” he says.

“We are deliberately being selective and working with those brands that are the most sophisticated, creating content that is high-level, explanatory – that’s going to appeal to our audiences.”

Beet.TV interviewed Zimbalist at the MediaLink CMO party at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Will Price, CEO of content marketing technology firm Flite, tells Beet.TV: “It used to be that brands would buy context to get their messages across. If they were a golf site, they would buy (ads in) golfing newspapers, golfing magazines, golfing television.

“Now there is more of this holistic approach about thinking about users – knowing who your user is, are they are customer?, are they not a customer?, where are they in the purchase funnel?… As opposed to just blindly buying publisher sites that happen to be topically relevant to the brand in question.”

One of a number of vendors to try uniting different advertising techniques for brands, Flite repackages marketers’ content efforts for conventional digital ad units, like this Walmart medical video skyscraper.

“We are just enjoying this huge uptake in content marketing that brands are getting in to,” strategy SVP Gilad de Vries told Beet.TV during the Cannes Lions advertiser conflab.

“Brands are becoming publishers, creating truly great content that has true value – whether it’s information or entertainment value, it’s not advertising. We help their content to be discovered by brand publishers like the CNNs of this world.”

de Vries says Outbrain deploys over 40 algorithms so that, when a reader of a news story reaches the bottom, they are shown links to news articles, either on-site or elsewhere, deemed to be relevant to the user. By making their own attractive content, brands can be inserted in to this slot on news sites via Outbrain.

“Right after the article that’s when they expect to get a recommendation for the next thing they might be interested in,” de Vries says. “If a piece of content doesn’t perform, it’s out.” Next stop, new Outbrain technology will let editors serve up packages of such content in to their editorial stream, the company told Journalism.co.uk.