Forbes seeks to tweak BrandVoices

Lucia Moses of Digiday writes Wednesday about how Forbes plans to tweak its BrandVoices native advertising program.

Moses writes, “Starting next week, Forbes will let brands republish content from elsewhere. In this way, advertisers won’t be tasked with constantly feeding the beast with fresh content. Forbes is itself actively working with advertisers now to identify content that they could port over.

“‘We were hearing their challenges, that they were going to the effort of creating all this content, and the pieces were getting published there, but then that was pretty much the extent of that,’ said Mark Howard, chief revenue officer at Forbes. ‘We’re suggesting that as long as they have the digital rights, and if it’s relevant for the Forbes audience, we’re encouraging them to republish that on BrandVoice. That way, they’re getting distribution for it.’

“The move stands to give more scale to brand publishing efforts on Forbes, yet it also brings up the ever-present question of quality control. (Forbes’ open platform approach recently presented such an issue when it published a post by editorial contributor Bill Frezza titled ‘Drunk Female Guests Are the Gravest Threat to Fraternities.’ Forbes fired the columnist.) The entire selling point of sponsor content programs like BrandVoice was that advertisers would create content specifically for a publisher’s audience. By letting advertisers post content produced for them by other publishers, there’s the possibility that they’ll dilute their message to the Forbes readership.”

Read more here.