Czechs excel in a foreign native advertising competition. Seznam Brand Studio is the best in the world

Kristýna Hořovská 11. March 2022

This year, the domestic Seznam Brand Studio impressed the international jury of the Native Advertising Awards with its campaigns to such an extent that they awarded it the best ever major native advertising studio in the world among the foreign competitors comprising large media houses. The jury also awarded the work of the domestic studio of the company Seznam.cz with two gold, two silver and one bronze medals.

The most prestigious award is undoubtedly the award for the best larger studio of the year. In total, Seznam.cz studio succeeded in five other categories – twice it ranked first, twice it was awarded the silver position and once the bronze one. I really appreciate the award from the Native Advertising Institute. There is nothing bigger in our industry. It makes me very happy that we manage to show that world-class projects can be done in the Czech Republic as well,” says Ondřej Sitta, head of Seznam Brand Studio of the company Seznam.cz. In the category Best Use of Infographic, the Czech News Center also scored when achieving the bronze medal.

Czech Seznam Brand Studio’s achievements in the Native Advertising Awards:

Gold: Seznam.cz – Best Use of Native Advertising on a Small Budget (Kids & Money, Czech National Bank, Symbio)

Gold: Seznam.cz – Best Native Advertising User Activation Campaign (Thirst for Exercise, Rajec, WMC Grey)

Silver: Seznam.cz – Most Effective Native Advertising Campaign (Going to the EURO, Hyundai)

Silver: Seznam.cz – Best Design (Journey to Freedom, Heffron) 

Bronze: Seznam.cz – Best Use of AFP Web TV (Foodie’s Czechlist, CzechTourism)

You can see the other works winning in the competition here.

“Native advertising is becoming more and more diverse and offers more opportunities to connect Czech online audiences with brands in a non-violent way. There is a growing interest in it from clients. Our investment in it grew up 53% year-on-year,” says Sitta. In particular, native video advertising, which appears between article teasers, has a big future. It combines the advantages of native advertising and the power of video as a media type. The data show that when initiated by the user, view rates achieve the above-average result. Our native video advertising on the main Seznam.cz page is also doing well. This is a premium format that offers the reach amounting to nearly four million real users per day.

The growing interest is confirmed by the clients themselves. “Thanks to native advertising, we were able to tell the story of Heffron rum through informative and visually interesting content. It is a modern form of communication that works and that we plan to continue to use. It allows us to convey our brand values to people in an attractive way and to build them further. This is crucial for Palírna U Zeleného stromu, a company with a five-hundred-year history,” says Michal Kučera, brand manager of the Heffron brand from Palírna U Zeleného stromu, about the use of the Seznam Native format of Seznam Brand Studio.

Ondřej Sitta was nominated for the Native Advertising Marketer of the Year again this year

Ondřej Sitta, head of Seznam Brand Studio, has been nominated again in the category of Native Advertising Marketer of the Year. It is already his sixth year at Seznam.cz. This year, however, the winner of this category was Tim Clark, Vice President and Director of Native Advertising of the company SAP.

Seznam Brand Studio offers clients a whole range of products such as Seznam Native, product placement, podcasts, series, product testing, contextual advertising and many more. It prepares campaigns for clients across the broad advertising network of technology company Seznam.cz. In 2021, Seznam Brand Studio published 276 customized client projects. Seznam Native projects alone generated over 16 million pageviews, nearly 700,000 direct clicks to client webs, and the average time spent by user when reading the content was four and a half minutes. People spent 103,370 hours by watching produced series. The studio has grown to 24 people and is still recruiting new members from the ranks of journalists, creative professions and marketers.