Native Ad or Editorial Content?

In the media buying space, it can be challenging to find symmetry between profitability and a genuine user experience. Adding more display ads may show a return on investment for a while, but not without heavy cost—the poor user experience will ultimately affect the value of your brand negatively. If you’ve been looking for a different way to more effectively distribute your content and find new customers—without disrupting the user’s experience—Native Advertising is the solution.

Move Over Banner Ads

Native advertising is now the standard digital ad channel garnering impressive consumer attention and engagement levels at a rate of up to 60% higher than traditional display ads. Especially when contextually relevant, native ads increase visibility, improve brand image, and promote user response. Compelling content that closely matches and integrates with the organic user experience on a given platform can generate 25% more consumer attention than banners ads.

Although native advertising has been around for a number of years as a means to distribute content and create brand awareness to a wide, targeted audience, the recent explosion of application development and digital media and mobile app use has ignited a native renaissance of sorts.

ACCOMPLISH YOUR GOALS WITH NATIVE ADS

As you've heard by now, "banner blindness" is indeed a thing. More people see and respond to native ads. In fact, consumers pay 25% more more attention to native ads than to traditional banner ads. And they engage with native ads 20% to 60% more than banner ads. Native ads certainly increase a company's visibility and enable it to start a conversation sooner, but did you know you should be using programmatic native advertising to help you accomplish several of your marketing goals?

Relevance, digital marketing agency, publication, and events producer, asked Storygize CEO David Osman his thoughts on mistakes marketers commit within native advertising. Following is the resulting article, highlighting over a dozen industry experts. We're honored to be featured in such great company!

With so many brands doing content marketing, the amount of information and content on the Internet has exploded. In fact, according to Mark Schaefer’s book, “The Content Code,” in 2020 there will be five times more information on the Internet than what was on it in 2015. That’s his conservative estimate, too.

Publishers and other websites often provide advertisers with a list of metrics by which to judge a native ad’s performance. While helpful, a brand should create its own metrics. Why? Native advertising typically relies on much subtler metrics to prove success than traditional banner ads (as most native ad campaigns seek to understand user attention and time spent with content versus driving immediate conversions).

Regardless of what format a content asset takes (e.g., a blog post, a bylined article, a guide, a white paper, etc.), the actual words, visuals, and other elements constitute the collective message that will be delivered to a target audience. So, it’s important for a brand to prudently craft its messages.

This generally takes the form of aligning content production with each buyer’s journey. This is the exact process marketers take when building out lead nurturing or email drip campaigns. Brands that use marketing automation tools in a robust way should have this done already. If not, appropriate research of the audience, analytics, competitors, media, and trends can help align content to the buyer’s journey.

Believe it or not, native advertising has been around for over 100 years. It has existed in magazines and newspapers, on radio and television, and today, it has become a major distribution channel for many digital media buyers and content marketers, alike.

Media buyers are finding it to be a fruitful alternative to display advertising. Unlike native advertising, display advertising is only a few decades old. However, its effectiveness at driving clicks and engagement has been steadily declining in the last decade. According to Solve Media, a person is more likely to survive a plane crash than click on a banner ad.

Programmatic native advertising supports content marketing. That means, in order to use in-feed native ads to promote a brand or product, a brand must have a solid content and distribution strategy. We’ve observed mistakes some marketers commit seemingly stemming from a misunderstanding of how in-feed native works.  The good news is, they're fixable! But first let's acknowledge what goes wrong.

Four major mistakes as follows: