By focusing on trusted, independently produced articles, San Francisco, California-based InPowered plans to not only take on the native advertising trend head first, but also use it to their best advantage.
To gain new customers, the company recently launched a free version of their “trusted content” discovery and promotion services, which are at the core of their service that promotes trusted online stories to consumers.
It’s a big risk for the company, to be sure, but the features and tracking metrics that they are now offering for free are actually quite impressive. What InPowered is betting is that, once consumers have a good feel for what they can do, which is promote positive stories through advertising, they’ll rapidly sign up to become customers for their paid services.
The tools they offer are quite persuasive. Consumer can discover what’s been written about a product or brand, as well as share their content with their social networks quite easily. They can also us an InPowered filter to find content that is independently written and free of any commercial stain, as well as access metrics on sharing. One very strong feature is the ability to see how many consumers actually read an article in its entirety and not just the headline.
InPowered’s focus is on content that is “trusted”, i.e. has not been sponsored by any particular vendor, manufacturer or brand. The two brothers who created the company actually sold their ad network last year and, ironically, are opposed to native advertising because of the dilution of trust that native ad “articles” cause for consumers.
How well their risky experiment pays off remains to be seen, but for the moment it offers some valuable tools at no cost that help wade through the (trendy) mire that is known as native advertising.