In 2013, The Onion, a satirical newspaper and online content creator, launched Onion Labs. As The Onion wound down its print operations it needed a new revenue stream, especially as the prevalence of ad-blockers continually hampered critical advertising revenue. Thus Onion Labs was born, a content creation studio that specialized in creating sponsored content that mirrored the tone and style of the Onion media family’s content, and achieved marketing goals for partner companies.
Currently the content studio enjoys tremendous success. This is in large part because of the incredible reach of The Onion’s properties. The Onion claims over 50 million unique visitors per month to its sites, and over 250 million in social media reach. It knows its core demographics, claiming to ” reach a young, urban, educated, and affluent audience”, provided statistics show that roughly 75% of readers have a college degree, and roughly 33% make more than 75K a year. These demographics are why companies like Audi, Ford, and Lenovo partnered with Onion Labs.
The case studies put forth on the Onion Labs website demonstrate significant success in terms of increased buying propensity, awareness, and even awards from marketing groups.
The success of these campaigns is in large part due to Onion Labs utilizing The Onion’s distinct voice and humor in crafting content. This can elevate brands to an entirely new level for people, and get people talking. The ads themselves often are serious parodies of sponsored content. By being so on the nose and honest about the fact that it is sponsored content, it effectively lifts the intellectual repulsion from the content, and permits the reader to enjoy the content on its own merits. Whereas much other sponsored content attempts to pass quietly for normal content, here it is front and center. In many ways, it enjoys a post-ironic flair to advertising, finding new and more entertaining ways to sell out, which Which the cynical millennials who make up more than 60% of the viewership find tremendously entertaining having grown up in the era of mass traditional advertising.
Recent Example:
Sources:
http://mediakit.theonion.com/
http://adage.com/article/media/onion-people-read-sponsored-content/298745/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion
‘Don’t Make a Commercial’: The Onion’s CCO Explains Why So Much Content Marketing Sucks