Does Branded Content fit into the Lower Funnel?

Analysis of Contalto’s 2024 premium publisher branded content data shows robust and sustained growth in paid social activity (incl. dark) and posts linking to brand pages.

Massive growth in paid social across all industry sectors

Nearly 7,000 brands were active in digital branded content in partnership with premium publishers in the USA, the UK and select Asian markets, 3% more than in 2023.

Market growth in volume terms was driven mainly by paid social (+75% on a like-for-like basis), while the number of web articles remained stable (+0.5%).

An analysis of the 15 most active industry sectors highlights the growing importance of paid social for absolutely all sectors, even if B2B-oriented sectors are still somewhat behind (Chart 1).

While on average brands get nearly 6 paid posts (of all types) for every web article published, the luxury sector is an exception. For some time, luxury brands have gone all-in with social. In 2024, they obtained close to 18 paid posts from their publisher partners for every web article. As a result, the luxury sector was well ahead of all sectors in terms of volume of paid posts, whereas it was only in fourth place a year earlier.

By comparison, brands in the Travel & Tourism sector, the most dynamic in terms of the number of web articles published, obtained around 4 paid posts per web article.

A shift toward paid posts linking to brand pages

In 2024, publishers made greater use of paid social to amplify the audience for content published on their own sites (2.3 posts with links to publishers' sites per web article on average, versus 1.5 in 2023).

The amplification of web articles by paid posts accounted for more than half (58%) of paid posts purchased by publishers for brands last year (chart 2).

However, paid posts published by publishers on social platforms are increasingly pointing towards brand pages (33% of all paid posts in 2024 vs. Just 20% in 2023), illustrating a strong trend in favor of lower-funnel strategies on the part of brands partnering with premium publishers.

Momentum in favour of branded content aimed at conversion rather than awareness or engagement is confirmed by the ever-increasing volume of product reviews and buying guides on publishers’ sites. We’ve been acutely aware of this trend for some time and are now putting an industry-first competitive monitoring and analytics system in place to cover it.

Contalto’s Commerce Content Intelligence service will be launched in a few weeks.

Watch this space!

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