For example, companies like Outbrain and Disqus, which power recommended content widgets on publisher sites like Mashable and USA Today, are helping to answer the question of scale by enabling marketers to promote their content through native ads across the web. Companies like Tabool and my own Sharethrough do this for video, enabling marketers to buy native promoted videos across a wide range of publisher types like blogs, content discovery sites, social games, and premium editorial sites.  Other companies like Buzzfeed and Federated Media power native ad campaigns that promote branded content in the form of promoted articles, lists, and sponsored content.

Federated Media Publishing introduced an ad product that automatically finds relevant content and includes a marketer's written or video content within the editorial well, using the same font and design elements.

Native Conversationalist Suite uses technology that FMP acquired from TextDigger in 2010 to automatically read all pages in the network, identifying not only topics but also sentiment and even slant connected with that topic. The company said that its conversation-targeted media has performed 49 percent higher in clickthrough rates than standard-placed media.

Making mistakes during the course of building your brand is inevitable, but how your company reacts to these fumbles will either further or hinder your company's cause. By ensuring that your community and PR teams are closely integrated, they can work together to ensure the best way to manage the public's concerns over a particular issue.

In addition to running several vertical blog networks around subjects from tech to food to health, Federated Media has built up its tech side in the past year. The first anniversary of its acquisition of ad net operator and supply side platform Lijit is approaching and FM is preparing to start offering private exchanges to publishers this fall.

Finally, after much thought and discussion, I was thrilled to sign this summer with Federated Media, an ad network that handles ads for bloggers. It's a big step, but they are a fantastic company and truly care about the bloggers and brands they work with.

Brands don’t have the stomach for a series of trial and error in the content game to better understand how to produce their branded delivery. I’m a big fan of companies like Federated Media and more algorithmically-based Percolate who are centralizing the content production and sourcing it out to partner brands.

Video streaming by Ustream

Video is exploding online. According to ComScore, there were 180 million U.S. Internet users who watched 33 billion online videos in June 2012, up from 178 million users and 6 billion videos from June 2011. Additionally, there were 11 billion video ads viewed. Media companies are experimenting with all sorts of monetization tactics for online video. With that in mind, Digiday asked several publishers one simple but tricky question: What does the next year of online video look like for publishers?

Sports fans are some of the most dedicated customers in the world. Not only can they name the height, weight, and speed statistics of their favorite athlete, they also sport a jersey on game day. Some might call that excessive enthusiasm over a single individual crazy, but really - this is brand loyalty in its truest form.

Q: Companies tend to be predisposed toward sales or technology, but rarely both. How do you make the most of your company's DNA?

A: Todd Vernon became something of an expert on company DNA by misjudging his own business, in a big way. A $6 million way. But more on that later.

These days, it is common knowledge that branding is an essential tool for building a successful, sustainable enterprise -- but what does that mean if your business is you? To answer this question, I scoured the land of independent-publishers-turned-savvy-branders to ask the best of the business to share their insights on what it takes to create and sustain their successful brands.

As the web’s capacity for pageviews increases, marketers are becoming less interested in reaching as many people as possible, and more interested in reaching the right people. According to Deanna Brown, the CEO of Federated Media, that’s why context is so important — the ability serve high volumes of advertising continues to expand, but the real value for a brand is to surround its message with the right context so that it reaches the most influential people among customers.

The publishing industry is undergoing a massive disruption, in which storytelling, advertising, and technology are beginning to intersect. By having unhindered access to social and mobile media platforms, brands are experimenting with paid, owned, and earned media to reach connected consumers in their channels of relevance. As brands dabble in publishing, traditional marketing and advertising networks are also evolving.

Federated Media is no stranger to the game. On this episode of Revolution, Deanna Brown explores the current state and future of brand publishing, content marketing and monetization models, and most importantly, what it takes to engage with connected consumers. As Brown observes, this is no longer about eyeballs and impressions, but instead about premium offerings and meaningful engagement. For brands to find success in new media, she believes that brands must look beyond traditional marketing and tell great stories without pushing messages.

There's a recent insurance commercial that shows a husband whispering on the phone in his living room late at night. His wife comes downstairs and thinks she has caught her spouse on the phone with another woman. She grabs the phone and asks what "she" is wearing, before receiving her husband's reply of, "Uh, khakis." The husband is actually on the phone talking with his insurance agent! What's the point of this commercial, besides the humorous twist? That the agent is willing to go above and beyond, and in doing so, is showing just how much he cares about his customers.

Last week, John Battelle, founder and chairman of blog network Federated Media, decided to join the board of marketing data services and technology company Acxiom – a digital entity that could hardly be more different from FM, which has positioned itself as a proponent of “conversational marketing” that looks to connect consumers and advertisers through specific content verticals like tech, food, parenting, health/wellness and other areas.