To be effective, native advertising has to be subtle, says Mike Smith

The branded content marketplace has grown very quickly, says Mike Smith

The branded content marketplace has grown very quickly and this form of advertising has become a viable alternative or compliment to digital display advertising, Mike Smith tells Sangeeta Tanwar.
 
How has native advertising evolved over the last decade?
 
There have been two major developments in the evolution of native advertising. Two companies, Outbrain and Taboola, have co-led the development of the native advertising marketplace for content recommendations over the past 10 years. Most publishers include content recommendations on their web pages as an ancillary revenue source and to promote recirculation within their websites. Additionally, and in parallel, Sharethrough and BuzzFeed can also be credited for the growth of native advertising in the early days. BuzzFeed published many of the early native “in-stream” ads, and Sharethrough was the ad tech company that powered native “in-stream” advertising for other publishers. Many different types of native advertising forms have developed over the past decade. Another important development has come as the result of an industry trade group called the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) creating a native advertising task force to develop a classification system to define the various categories and types of native advertising. Among other benefits, the IAB’s classification system has helped to create consumer disclosure recommendations.

 

With the advent of digital, what are the opportunities that native advertising offers to marketers?
 
Publishers are using native advertising to offer marketers new opportunities to reach consumers. Marketers are working with publishers to produce branded content that informs, inspires or entertains readers and at the same time builds brand awareness for the products and services of the advertiser. The branded content marketplace has grown very quickly and this form of advertising has become a viable alternative or compliment to digital display advertising.
 
How successful have been global marketers in leveraging native advertising effectively?
 
GE and Marriott are two good examples of global marketers using native advertising effectively. Under the leadership of Alexa Christon, head of media innovation for General Electric, GE has been working with many partners on native advertising programmes. In each case, the company creates a new experience for the specific audience that each publishing partner is best suited to reach. For example, in November 2015, The New York Times sent a Google cardboard virtual reality (VR) headset with the week’s “Sunday Magazine” to one million subscribers of the print edition of the Times. This campaign was done in conjunction with the Times’ T Brand Studios. GE created original virtual reality content that ran alongside editorial content, which was then promoted with native content as well on nytimes.com.

 
GE chose to partner with The New York Times to reach a mass audience and to introduce them to a new technology that allows viewers to experience a story in a whole new way — the medium being the message. Christon realises that many companies are interested in or in the process of creating a content marketing team, but at GE, “everyone in marketing thinks about content,” about how to create an experience that will resonate with people. There’s no individual content marketing manager or content marketing team. Instead, developing brand content and native advertising is part of the job for everyone working in marketing at GE.

 
Marriott won a Webby Award (for excellence on the internet) in 2015 for a native ad campaign that it produced on Reddit. Marriott asked Reddit users to write or film “sales pitches” that would describe what makes their neighbourhoods special — either because they love their community or hate it — and then post them on Reddit. Marriott encouraged Reddit users to do this by offering “a vacation of a lifetime” with $4,000 to spend on flights and a stay at a Marriott hotel and the opportunity to try out the company’s 4-D virtual travel experience, where they can be “teleported” to the place of their dreams. The campaign was so successful that Marriott received about 200,000 clicks on its contest page and Reddit’s highest-ever user-generated content for sponsored posts.

 
What are the key challenges that publishers face  as they tap into native advertising to grow revenues?
 
The challenge to native advertising is to make it subtle enough that it truly becomes “native” — that it blends in with the surrounding editorial material so that readers will read it and not care that it is written by an advertiser rather than by a journalist or by a journalist on behalf of an advertiser — while at the same time, being sufficiently above board — by clearly identifying the sponsor — that the piece doesn’t confuse or irritate readers who may feel that they’ve been duped into reading something that isn’t truly informative but just turns out to be a pitch for some product or company.

 
As a marketing tool — how does native advertising compare with content marketing in terms of opportunities, cost and impact?
 
Content marketing and native advertising are different types of programs, and branded content is a form of native advertising. As marketing tools, content marketing, native advertising and branded content are effective strategies that can create positive return on investment for advertisers in a wide variety of business categories. A basic comparison of content marketing and native advertising is that an advertiser brand generally authors its own content for content marketing programs whereas instead for native advertising the advertiser brand partners with a publisher or a native advertising technology services company to create its content. Regarding branded content, a type of native advertising, the publisher-created content for the advertiser brand runs on the publisher’s website in the same form and function as the publisher’s editorial content but ideally with appropriate consumer disclosures.