Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade.

In today’s edition of the Unmakers, Unmade’s Tim Burrowes talks to Luke Spano, founder of Avid Collective, about his attempts to take the pain out of briefing native campaigns.

Avid Collective, founded in 2017, has evolved from an unremarkable publisher to trying to solve a bigger publishing problem - how brands can brief out native campaigns at scale.

Avid is carving out a place within the long tail of native content with the aim of making it easier for media agencies and brands to work with smaller publishers like Pedestrian Group, Urban List, Junkee, Forbes Australia, Daily Mail Australia, The Guardian, Frankie, and Forbes Australia. It works with brands and agencies including New Zealand Tourism, Westpac, OMD, Lion, Unilever and Mindshare, and has access to over 140 publishers.

Avid’s platform and staff sit between brands and publishers, pushing out briefs and helping manage the responses and campaign delivery.

“We use the moniker brief once, personalise everywhere,” Spano says of Avid’s approach. ‘You're only doing one set of briefing that's going into the platform, but then that will be distributed out to the publishers. It's still the publishers and individual content creators that are creating the content.”

The promise of native advertising has been somewhat tarnished by the low quality output driven by the likes of Taboola and Outbrain.

Spano acknowledges: “They've definitely given the word native a bit of a dirty name and tarnished it a little bit because a lot of the content that gets distributed through there is quite low quality.”

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

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