How Kia Sweden captured attention at scale with effective distribution in Sweden

The challenge

Content advertising is an effective way to move consumers beyond simple brand awareness to a deeper understanding of a product’s value. However, a persistent challenge is ensuring that audiences actually engage with the content.

For Kia Sweden, the goal was to increase both brand awareness and purchase intent for its electric cars in Sweden. While high-quality editorial content was produced in collaboration with Bizkit Havas and published on their website, the key challenge remained: how to effectively distribute this content and capture reader attention at scale in a competitive media landscape.

Solution

To achieve this, they deployed Content Display ads across 187 premium Swedish publisher sites using the Readpeak platform. The process was highly automated: Kia provided image and text assets, which were dynamically formatted to match the look and feel of each publisher’s editorial environment, ensuring seamless visual integration and saving significant production time.

A critical factor in the campaign’s success was the platform’s machine learning algorithm. It optimizes for engagement using non-personally identifiable signals like contextual data, device type, and historical performance.

This approach is privacy-friendly, does not rely on third-party cookies, and allows the campaign to reach 100% of the potential online audience. Furthermore, the platform continuously A/B tests more than 20 creative variations to maximize relevance and performance across different contexts.

Results

The campaign significantly outperformed industry benchmarks:

Outperforming display

CTR reached 1%, 3–4 times higher than traditional display advertising

Top-performing CTR

Best-performing variant achieved a CTR of 1.32%

Efficient CPC

CPC averaged only 7.5 SEK

Strong engagement

Average reading time reached 1 minute and 41 seconds, indicating strong engagement

Beyond performance metrics, the campaign demonstrated that long-form branded content can successfully capture attention when distributed effectively. It also delivered value across the ecosystem — driving engagement for the advertiser while increasing eCPM and revenue for premium publishers.

Overall, the collaboration proved that with the right technology and strategy, content advertising can deliver not just visibility, but meaningful audience interaction — creating a true win-win for advertisers, publishers, and readers alike.

Readpeak provides the conditions to deliver what is often talked about, but rarely achieved. That is, an advertising experience rather than just an advertising contact. The fact that it is easy to administer and easy to follow up makes it a grateful channel for reaching out across the country and at the same time getting a pulse check on what sparks people’s interest.

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