When I put together a paid media plan, I focus that plan on the organization I’m working with. It focuses on what that organization does best, or where their priority is and incorporates that as the cornerstone of the plan. As a result, the paid ads that people ultimately see are more authentic. In other words, we’re not just doing it because everyone else is, but because it is a true representation of your organization.

For this post, I want to review the specific experience around one of those cornerstones — supplied content on the NY Times.

In 2020 my team and I worked with a large nonprofit that had an ambitious donation goal –increase digital, unrestricted donations by 200% year-over-year.

We worked with them on a number of digital efforts that resulted in some big changes. The biggest shift was to focus on storytelling instead of project reporting. This allowed the organization to connect with potential donors on an emotional level, not just a practical one. The other big shift was to collect better data about donors and turn that into actionable insights.

As part of our paid media plan we wanted to highlight these changes as a way to connect with new audiences. The budget was limited, so we needed to do so in an effective and efficient way. Using the better data and the focus on better content as a driving force we decided to include supplied content.

What is Supplied Content

Supplied content is when an organization writes a piece of content and then pays for it to be published on a publisher’s platform. Most publishers will include some incentive for this. While every publisher is different, these incentives include things like a built-in ad buy that drives traffic to the content or social posts or mention it in a newsletter or on a podcast.

It’s different from paid content discovery because the content lives on the publisher’s site. This often leads to an increase in trust from the people who read it.

Supplied content is labeled “Paid Post” or “Sponsored” or something similar, but a good content team will create content that feels like the publication’s content. This is important to ensure your message fits with what audiences are expecting and feels more like ‘real’ content instead of an ad.

Why Supplied Content on NY Times

Once we decided supplied content was right for our mix of paid efforts, we then evaluated different publications. We analyzed audiences and compared them to our donor profile. We evaluated other supplied content and the cost vs potential ROI.

Ultimately we selected the NY Times as the best platform for our supplied content. There were many reasons for choosing the times including:

• The ability to use perspective and motivational targeting
• The flex frame ad format to drive traffic
• The ability to make revisions after the piece launched
• The CPM and expected ROI of the ads
• The audience and how it aligned with our donor profile
• And more

Let me take a moment to say this is not an ad to use supplied content on NY Times. It is merely a reflection of supplied content and a recent example that happened to be on the times.

3 Things to Know

1. This should is a great top of funnel activity. We’ve seen it decrease the amount of time it takes to convert a donor, but have used this as a way to expand the donor universe.
2. On the NY Times, you also get a certain amount of ad spend as part of your supplied content agreement. I won’t share how much, but we felt it was a good deal and part of the reason we decided to do sponsored content on the times.
3. There is not frequent reporting, but you do get a couple of revisions. This is interesting to me and an area I expect the times will improve. We would have liked to used the revisions as a way to incorporate data – reworking to better highlight what was working and potentially rewriting what was not. The same is true with the ad targeting.

Overall, I would recommend this as a tactic to an organization that needs to get name recognition quickly but would like to see the times evolve their offering with this in a number of ways — the reporting one I mentioned above is the main one.

If you want to talk about how you can better use your content to create a more engaging paid approach don’t hesitate to reach out.