Sponsored Articles Reported, Written and Placed With Editors

Ask a publisher for the median time on page across their last five commercial pieces before you agree a price. Under ninety seconds and the piece is being read as a banner: you are buying a URL and a logo, and the fee should reflect that. Asked before the negotiation rather than after, that one question changes what a placement is worth more than anything written later. The reporting comes before the brief: Each piece starts with reporting. For a freight forwarder that has meant sitting with the operations lead until the piece contained a real number — the actual dwell time at a terminal, the actual cost of a rolled booking. For a foundation it has meant reading four years of annual accounts before writing a line about where the money goes. The piece has to survive being read by somebody who works in the industry it describes. If it cannot, the publisher's own editors quietly bury it, and no amount of paid amplification repairs that. What is written: One piece, in Dutch or English, to the host publication's register rather than to yours. A piece for FD reads nothing like a piece for a logistics trade title or for Tweakers, and copy arriving in your brand-book voice gets rewritten by their desk anyway. Headline and standfirst come in three versions, because the editor will have a view and it is faster to arrive with options than to defend one. Images are specified and either sourced or commissioned. Stock photography of handshakes is not used. Terms settled with the publisher before the fee is agreed: The label, in the publisher's own house wording. Whether the piece is indexed and reachable from site search, or parked on a partner subdomain behind a noindex tag. Whether it enters a newsletter, and which one. How long it stays live — several Dutch titles unpublish commercial work at twelve months by default, and a permanent URL has to be asked for in writing before signature. And whether you may quote from the piece in your own paid distribution afterwards, which standard terms frequently forbid. Excluded: Guaranteed do-follow links. I do not buy them, do not ask for them, and will end a placement conversation that turns into one. Also excluded: sites with no named editorial staff, link insertion into existing articles, and any arrangement where a studio writes to your bullet points and the result is invoiced as journalism. The nonprofit case, specifically: Cost-of-fundraising figures are public for CBF-registered organisations and any reader who cares will already have them. Commercial pieces for foundations are written on the assumption the number is known, which usually means addressing it in the second paragraph instead of writing around it. Pieces that avoid it collect the comments that undo the placement. Who this is wrong for: Anyone counting placements. If the plan is eight pieces a quarter across whatever titles will take them, another practice will do that faster and cheaper, and the work is genuinely a different craft. Anyone who needs four internal stakeholders to sign off final text: on the titles worth being in, the publisher's desk holds the last edit, and that condition is not negotiable. And anyone whose product has a live regulatory problem in the market. A placement makes that problem more visible, not less, and I would rather say so before invoicing than write delicately around it.