Art direc­tors dream­ing up new cam­paigns tend to like inno­v­a­tive depar­tures from the con­ven­tion­al, and a new prod­uct devel­oped by the New York head­quar­tered adver­tis­ing agency Jun Group may fit that bill admirably.

Jun Group made its name as a mar­ket lead­ing video adver­tis­ing plat­form, so when a com­pa­ny like that exper­i­ments with a break in tra­di­tion, most cre­ative art direc­tors will find their ears prick­ing up instinc­tive­ly. But what is this new prod­uct and why is Jun Group so excit­ed by it?

Owned adver­tis­ing

It’s called Over­drive and is the prod­uct of the agency’s exper­i­men­ta­tion with a for­mat it dubs ‘owned adver­tis­ing.’ It might be cir­cu­lat­ing in the news now, but accord­ing to Jun Group’s CEO Mitchell Reichgut, it was ‘soft launched’ four months ago in June. And the rea­son for the excite­ment? Well it’s a pret­ty darned good one: in that short lit­tle inter­val, Over­drive now accounts for a third of the agency’s rev­enue (well, over 30 per­cent of it, any­way). Pret­ty well any art direc­tor involved in an ini­tia­tive as suc­cess­ful as that would be hug­ging him­self today.

The for­mat looks like spon­sored con­tent when it appears on a publisher’s web­site (eg, appear­ing embed­ded in a news feed) but if a view­er clicks on it, some­thing unex­pect­ed hap­pens – the ad links to an advertiser’s pro­mo­tion­al web page or micro-web­site. For Reichgut, this kind of spon­sored con­tent is cru­cial – for­get the stan­dard pro­mo­tion­al copy; con­sumers get some­thing inter­est­ing and worth­while with Overdrive.

Or is it just spon­sored content?

The more skep­ti­cal art direc­tor might be won­der­ing at this stage whether there’s any real dif­fer­ence between what Jun Group calls owned adver­tis­ing and what every­one else calls spon­sored con­tent. To be frank, it might be a futile exer­cise to even try to make any hard and fast dis­tinc­tions; the Over­drive ads do look rather like con­tent-style or native ads, how­ev­er, Reichgut says that the empha­sis is dif­fer­ent with Over­drive: “The focus is on pages that the brands con­trol… The big insight is that it’s no longer about reach­ing out to peo­ple but bring­ing peo­ple in.”

Essen­tial­ly, Over­drive makes use of Jun Group’s exist­ing net­work and has the capac­i­ty to deliv­er lit­er­al­ly mil­lions of impres­sions for every campaign.

Over 30 per­cent increase in rev­enue in under three months says it’s working.