New York's Food52 platform finds new ways to draw in advertisers
New York-based food website Food52 has devised a number of editorial features aimed at improving advertisers' return on investment. It has sold space on its menu generator to an advertiser, which will offer custom recipes as well as the standard ones, and its hotline will provide sponsor's answers as well ones from site users. Another feature Food52 is pitching is a recipe game. Chief revenue officer Sam Stahl said the ad rate is "significantly higher" for its tools compared with standard native ads.

Seemingly every publisher has a content studio to chase branded content revenue. Food52 is among the publishers trying to find ways to differentiate, like BuzzFeed with its sponsored quizzes and Bloomberg with sponsored interactive features. One of Food52’s challenges is that food content is everywhere now. Advertisers are also moving away from clicks as a way to measure branded content’s effectiveness in favor of ads that people spend a lot of time with or are shown to drive sales.

“We’re getting more and more requests that we want to tie this branded content into a sales research study,” said Sam Stahl, CRO at Food52. “Everyone’s getting more sophisticated and saying, ‘We’re spending all this money on branded content; we need to see it’s resulting in ROI.’”