REDDING, CT: Publishers have mostly seen native advertising as a way to monetise websites, but there are also opportunities to insert native ads into emails, which, as consumers opt in to these, have higher engagement rates.

Meredith Corp, the US media and marketing company which has a large female audience, is exploring this area with Kraft Foods and while neither party would reveal any details on performance they did say it was encouraging.

"Native has been big on our radar over the last year," Andy Wilson, Meredith svp & chief digital officer, told Marketing Land. "We've been thinking how do we integrate our advertisers with our editorial content,"

Selling native ads in emails – and Mereditch sends 450m of them every month – was a logical development of the long-running practice of selling banner ads there.

We have high engagement rates with our email," said Wilson, "and we knew there was lots of opportunity there."

Kraft Foods was already working closely with the company, as its audience is a prime target.

"We have over 96% household penetration," said Dana Shank, associate director at Kraft Foods, "but it's important for us to think about how to extend that across all of our brands and stay in touch and engage with consumers."

"We have seen our own content have much better engagement than ads, which are already high," she continued, "and we were thinking about the value of content, especially in email, and thinking about ways to extend that with other publications."

Bringing the two sides together was a CRM ad targeting platform: LiveIntent used its own data as well as first-party data from both Meredith and Kraft to match and deliver the best Kraft recipe for each email newsletter theme and individual subscriber.

"The recipes that are served to Meredith's readership using optimisation technology from LiveIntent have performed well and met/exceeded our current benchmarks for customer engagement," said Shank.

Data sourced from Marketing Land; additional content by Warc staff