• by Sara Guaglione , February 8, 2016

Forbes is so sure its content marketing works that the company will provide a refund if marketers don’t get their brand lift increase.

Forbes’ BrandVoice Increase Guarantee, which launched Monday, is similar to the money-back promise it once made for display ads in 2002 for marketers purchasing digital advertising on Forbes.com. 

The new guarantee for BrandVoice, its native ad product launched in 2010, claims marketers that spend a minimum of $250,000 for both display advertising and at least seven BrandVoice stories published on Forbes.com over 60 days will be guaranteed an increase in brand lift.

Or they get their money back.

Though Forbes doesn’t guarantee how much the lift will be, Ann Marinovich, vice president, advertising products and strategy at Forbes Media, pointed to a 2013 study by Forbes and IPG Media Labs. It revealed the most effective combination for driving brand lift was combining branded content and display advertising.

Participants from Forbes.com who looked at Web pages with branded content were 41% more likely to express an intent to buy the brand versus those who saw the pages without branded content.

Those who saw branded content were 28% more likely to have a favorable view of the brand, Marinovich told Publishers Daily.

When consumers saw branded content paired with a display ad from the same brand, they were more likely to recall the brand than if they had looked at a page with just branded content, she added.

Forbes is also managing its risk by requiring that $150,000 of the spending goes to display and $100,000 to native ads, with the measurement running across all of it.

For each eligible marketer, Forbes will commission a third-party research partner chosen by the marketer to measure and evaluate the campaign across metrics, including Brand Awareness, Brand Favorability, Message Association and Purchase Intent.

As native ad market continues to get more crowded, advertisers want to know if their ads actually work, making performance guarantees more popular.

Roughly 35% of Forbes’ total advertising revenues are generated by BrandVoice partners, including BrandVoice campaigns, according to Marinovich.