A former senior manager at a print industry leader is becoming the chief executive of a company that specializes in one of the most popular trends in online advertising.
Steve Sachs, who held several top posts at the Time Inc. unit of Time Warner until he left almost a year ago, is joining OneSpot, a start-up based in Austin, Tex., as chief executive. Matt Cohen, the founder of OneSpot who had been chief executive, is becoming president.
When Mr. Sachs left Time Inc., he was executive vice president for consumer marketing and sales. His duties included helping to adapt the company’s magazines for devices like tablets and e-readers. Before that, he led Time Inc. magazines that included Cooking Light, Real Simple and Southern Living.
OneSpot works for blue-chip marketers like Dell, Home Depot, Procter & Gamble, Spectrum Brands and Unilever. The company specializes in wht is called content advertising, native advertising or branded content. On online platforms, it offers alternatives to banner ads, which have been losing their potency as an advertising medium because of rapidly declining consumer engagement - that is, falling click-through rates.
What OneSpot does is create, in real time, online ad units that use material like articles, blog posts, white papers, video clips and comments in social media. The automated ads appear in place of banner ads on the marketer’s own Web sites as well as on Web sites that are part of online ad networks.
OneSpot also optimizes the ads in ways that include testing different versions as well as sequencing ads that vary in approach depending on the sites on which they appear.
Content advertising works so well, Mr. Sachs said, because “consumers would much rather click on content than advertising.â€
As a result, he added, click-through rates can be “two times to 50 t! imes higher†than banner ads.
A pitfall with content advertising or native advertising is that it can blur the line between editorial content and paid advertising because the goal is for the ad to be perceived by the reader as content, or like content.
“There is no doubt†that is an issue, Mr. Sachs said, adding that in his previous job at Time Inc. there would frequently be questions about the advertising sections styled to look like articles that are known as advertorials.
Advertorials are “thinly disguised advertising,†Mr. Sachs said, whereas content advertising “is not that†because it is “high in value.â€
Mr. Sachs, who is 47, said that after leaving Time Inc. in March 2012, he and his family moved to Austin over the summer and he “took a few months off to recharge†before starting to “look at opportunities in technology and marketing and content.â€
OneSpot began offering previews to potential clients in March 2012. The company recently received $15 million in funding from RSL Venture Partners and 500 Startups.
