Case Study
Dotdash Meredith Scales Native Email Revenue with Zeta's Native Ad Blueprints
Dotdash Meredith is the leading magazine publisher in the United States, engaging millions of readers through household-name brands like People, Better Homes & Gardens, InStyle, Allrecipes, Real Simple, and Southern Living. With a 119-year legacy of trusted editorial, Dotdash Meredith leverages its robust email newsletter program to deliver highly personalized, category-specific content across entertainment, lifestyle, food, home, and parenting. These newsletters serve as a vital connection point for audience engagement and revenue generation.
The Challenge
To support continued growth and diversify its ad sales revenue, Dotdash Meredith sought to expand its email newsletter inventory by adding native advertising formats. While native ads are known for delivering higher engagement, the traditional process of manually coding these units into emails wasn’t scalable across the company’s extensive brand portfolio. Each publication had unique design standards, requiring a solution that could seamlessly integrate native units while preserving the user experience. At the same time, Dotdash Meredith needed to validate that native ads would not negatively impact content engagement or click behavior.
The Solution
Zeta partnered with Dotdash Meredith to implement Native Ad Blueprints, a flexible, turnkey solution designed to streamline native ad delivery across email newsletters. These customizable templates allowed each brand to maintain its own look and feel, ensuring native ads matched each newsletter’s styling, fonts, and color palette. The new inventory was monetized using both direct deals and Zeta’s Native Curated Packages, which provided immediate access to premium advertiser demand.
To ensure performance and maintain reader engagement, A/B tests were launched for Allrecipes and Food & Wine audiences. Segmented testing confirmed that the native units had no negative impact on content interaction, validating the format’s value from both a revenue and engagement standpoint.
Following this success, Dotdash Meredith expanded the use of Native Ad Blueprints across additional newsletters, unlocking new revenue streams with minimal lift and maintaining a premium user experience across all properties.
