Native advertising has moved from the fringes of digital advertising to the forefront. Confusingly though, it’s sometimes hard to know what it actually is.
Where true native advertising is really useful is in helping brands with their content marketing. However, because of its buzz or allure, a number of different advertising solutions have attached the label ‘native’ to what they do, even if they don’t really help brands with content marketing.
To provide some clarification, the IAB in the US has done an excellent job of cataloguing all the different solutions that describe themselves as ‘native’ in their Native Advertising Playbook. While it is a terrific overview, the IAB is too diplomatic to identify which of these solutions represent true native advertising.
True native advertising should be evaluated in terms of its ability to distribute content for brands. Content marketing has all kinds of benefits, from driving brand awareness to creating an emotional connection to building thought leadership.
Delivering the right experience in content marketing is inherently challenging and a real art, as three different stakeholders need to be satisfied:
1. The audience needs to find the content authentically interesting and engaging, presented in context and with an intuitive user experience
2. The publisher has to feel that the content is appropriate for their environment
3. The brand needs to see that its business objectives are achieved
Unfortunately, even when done right, publisher environments may not have enough scale to serve the needs of advertisers. Technology solution providers can help solve for this by bringing together multiple publishers in a network model. However, this is where a number of providers get it wrong. By focusing entirely on scale and not on meeting the needs of the three stakeholders – the audience, the publisher, and the brand – they present marketers with scalable solutions that use the term ‘native’ but don’t really help achieve their content marketing objectives.
The placement might be styled to look like it’s part of the publishers’ website, but is it the right context? When the audience clicks on the story, do they stay inside the publication or are they linked away somewhere that they didn’t expect? Are they presented with content to read as they expected, or do they end up on some transactional website?
Ads that are dubbed ‘native’ with headlines styled to look like the publisher’s website but link away to another website interrupt the audience’s experience. And when users are expecting content but instead they see a travel booking engine or some type of hard-sell promotion, they get confused and irritated. I recently saw a ‘native’ execution that clicked away to a page our IT department classified as malware!
These types of experiences may provide plenty of scale, but they are bad for publishers, frustrating for the audience, and ultimately corrosive to the brand. This is not true native advertising; this is more like banner ads in disguise.
True native advertising delivers on a brand’s content marketing objectives and ideally it does so with scale. The brand’s content needs to be compelling for the audience, consistent with the context and integrity of the publisher, and must also meet the brand’s marketing objectives. Other solutions may use the term ‘native’, but if these three stakeholders aren’t satisfied, it’s simply not getting the job done.
