VIDEO: How T Brand Studio Works With Native Advertising - and Why It Works

By Pernille Uhd Kristiansen on November 25, 2016
  • 13
  • 0

How does New York Times' T Brand Studio create such compelling native advertising? How is it possible to convince advertisers to tell real stories? What's the future of T Brand Studio? In this interview, you will find out.

We talked to two of the forces behind the success of T Brand Studio right after they received a Native Advertising Award for Native Advertising Studio of the Year (over 20) at Native Advertising DAYS in Berlin on November 16th, 2016.

Watch the video or read the transcript of our conversation below with Raquel Bubar, Director of T Brand Studio International and Michael Villaseñor, Creative Director of Ad Marketing & Innovation at The New York Times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og-J1tlxpyQ 

Raquel Bubar: We work with native advertising to make quality content in a way that is compelling to the reader. So it's content that would be interesting just as well as newsroom content that comes up on the New York Times' site.

The T Brand Studio takes a unique lens on all content that we make. We come at things from a journalistic perspective so it's very much driven by our journalists' research and writing and they all have backgrounds from various newsrooms. I think that's the lens that we take that maybe is unique to other brands.

We also look at it always as a New York Timesean sense of the content.

Michael Villaseñor: I think publishers can learn from us that content can be original for a brand - that there's always a unique story within every brand and to take the time to unearth that is quality - not only from a reading perspective but also just from a standard of creation.

Related: The New York Times makes some of the best native advertising, and here is why

Raquel Bubar: We try to convince advertisers to do ambitious advertising because we don't want them to do something that readers and viewers have seen before. To do that we look at the story that they want to tell, and we think about it in a way that maybe they haven't been able to explain before. Maybe they didn't even know that it was a story and they've come to us and we say 'yes that's perfect'. So we try to work with them, to listen to them, and then uncover something that they haven't told before.

The T Brand Studio now has a big ambition to expand our business internationally, so right now we are over a hundred people in the New York office, but we've just started a studio in London and in Paris and soon-to-be in Asia.

Michael Villaseñor: I hope that we in the coming years get more opportunities to win on specific media that we create. So opposed from just the overall content, it would be great to start winning for video specifically, winning for photography. I think the quality of the work that we do is often one package, and it would be great to start seeing those individual pieces get realized on their own.

MORE VIDEO INTERVIEWS WITH NATIVE ADVERTISING PROS:
The 7 Steps to Creating Evergreen Content
Rebecca Lieb: “Advertisers and Brands Need to Adopt to the New Reality”
The DNA of Native Advertising Success in 2017
BuzzFeed on How to Make Native Advertising Go Viral
How Native Advertising Can Help Extend Your Brand
“The Head of a Native Ad Studio Should Have an Editorial Background”

Want more? Sign up for the Native Advertising Institute Newsletter and get weekly insights and news from the people who live and breathe native advertising.