Can­ny busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers eager to get the low-down on the hottest new devel­op­ments in Adland might spend a lit­tle time famil­iar­iz­ing them­selves with Ide­al Media, a New York-based start­up that takes an intel­li­gent approach to native con­tent advertising.

Con­tent pro­mo­tion + con­tent cre­ation = suc­cess 

Found­ed by erst­while Ven­ture Fan Net­work chief rev­enue offi­cer Eder Hol­guin, it fol­lows in the foot­steps of cus­tomer engage­ment plat­forms like Taboola and Out­brain, work­ing with pub­lish­ers to include rec­om­mend­ed con­tent on their web pages. The startup’s Direc­tor of Sales, Matthew Mosk, explains that the look of this con­tent will be dif­fer­ent from one site to anoth­er, because Ide­al media spe­cial­izes in cre­at­ing bespoke native inte­gra­tions every time. And it’s mak­ing mon­ey from the spon­sored con­tent that gets thrown into the page’s mix.

Fol­low­ing in another’s foot­steps is all well and good, but hard-nosed busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers will want to know what’s unique about Ide­al Media. For one thing, its units work on mobile, tablets and social media as well as desk­tops and Mosk says it’s devel­oped a “high­ly tar­get­ed chan­nel strat­e­gy (auto­mo­biles, sports, tech, health, women’s, etc.).” But the key dis­tinc­tion is that, unlike its com­peti­tors, Ide­al Media isn’t sim­ply pro­mot­ing con­tent: it’s help­ing its cus­tomers cre­ate it as well, offer­ing its adver­tis­ers free con­tent mar­ket­ing services.

Why sub­tle­ty wins 

The aim, accord­ing to Mosk, is to take a more sub­tle and nuanced approach to con­tent mar­ket­ing. It’s clear to a grow­ing num­ber of brands that today’s savvy web users aren’t sim­ply ignor­ing dis­play ads, they’re also put off by find­ing a bla­tant ad when they click on a link sug­ges­tive of inter­est­ing con­tent (which is stan­dard fayre for some Con­tent Dis­cov­ery Net­works). Ide­al Media strives to ensure its con­tent is gen­uine­ly rel­e­vant and inter­est­ing – the team doesn’t go in for straight­for­ward ads.

As most busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers would agree, that’s quite a gap in the Adland world that Ide­al media is bridg­ing (Out­brain, for exam­ple, doesn’t cre­ate cus­tomized con­tent of its own, although hav­ing recent­ly acquired Scrib­it, it’s able to let its cus­tomers search for rel­e­vant con­tent from pub­li­ca­tions like the Huff Post).

As things stand, Ide­al Media (which is fund­ed by its founder, Eder Hol­guin, plus friends and fam­i­ly) plans to go on offer­ing free con­tent cre­ation but it’s con­sid­er­ing charg­ing for pre­mi­um services.