Digg’s Content Ads: Actual social media advertising

Digg’s content ads are the best example i’ve seen yet of advertising that leverages the true nature of social media – the content.

Advertisers include Digg stories relevant to their industry or mission, and include links to these stories in their ad message.  Brilliant!

Apparently, they are getting 100 times the average CTR of standard display ads.  Finally, someone’s figured out a way to make the content part of the brand message.  It’s basically combining the power of contextual advertising with the branding power of display ads – a solid combination since traditional contextual text ads (ie. Google Adsense) don’t have the branding/visual element and result in anemic CTRs.

You can read more about the particulars here on the Digg blog: http://blog.digg.com/?p=1057

Well done Digg…