Native advertising

Native advertising is an online advertising method in which the advertiser attempts to gain attention by providing content in the context of the user's experience. Native ad formats match both the form and the function of the user experience in which it is placed. The advertiser's intent is to make the paid advertising feel less intrusive and thus increase the likelihood users will click on it.^[1]

Forms

One form of native advertising, publisher-produced brand content, is similar in concept to a traditional advertorial, which is a paid placement attempting to look like an article. A native ad tends to be more obviously an ad than most advertorials.^[2]

Formats for native advertising include promoted videos, images, articles, music and other media.^[3] Examples of the technique include Search engine marketing (ads appearing alongside search results are native to the search experience) and Twitter with promoted Tweets, trends and people. Other examples include Facebook's promoted stories or Tumblr's promoted posts. Content marketing is another form of native advertising, placing sponsor-funded content alongside editorial content ^[4] or showing "other content you might be interested in" which is sponsored by a marketer alongside editorial recommendations.^[5]

Platforms

The types of platforms and websites that participate in native advertising can be split into two categories, “open” and “closed” platforms:^{[citation needed]}

• Closed platforms are brands creating profiles and/or content within a platform, then promoting that content within the confines of that same closed platform. Examples include Promoted Tweets on Twitter, Sponsored Stories on Facebook and TrueView Video Ads on YouTube.
• Open platforms are defined by promoting the same piece of branded content across multiple platforms within native ad formats. Unlike closed platforms, the branded content asset lives outside the platform.

For example, Adyoulike, AdsNative, Sharethrough and Nativo are open native advertising platforms, which allow brands to include the same content in native ad placements on multiple publishers.^[6] Large publishers, such as Washington Post, have recently started introducing their own native advertising formats.^[7]

Examples

Advertorial in printed media demonstrate native advertising where bloggers are established as credible authorities but in fact are recommending brands they are paid to recommend and by definition are conflicted.

More subtle forms of native advertising with less of an ethical backlash began emerging on Facebook in 2012 and 2013 where brands captured photos or videos of guests and overlaid a logo or brand message and then posted to either the guest's own Facebook page or the brand's corporate page on Facebook. For example, ads for the premiere of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey consisted of photographs of VIPs with a Hobbit logo at the bottom.^[8]

Twitter's base advertising product MoPub, acquired in September 2013, creates native ads within the Twitter stream such that posts from brands fit into the context around the rest of the user's Twitter updates. MoPub has been very successful in generating not only click-through to websites (lead generation) but even so far as direct sale of gaming applications.^[9]

See also

• Contextual advertising
• Content marketing

References

External links

• Khan, Fahad, “Toward (Re) Defining Native Advertising”, Huffington Post, 3 September 2013.
• Joel, Mitch (13 February 2013). "We Need a Better Definition of "Native Advertising"". Harvard Business Review Blog. 
• Salmon, Felix, "The disruptive potential of native advertising", Reuters blogpost, 9 April 2013.
• Rice, Andrew, Does BuzzFeed know the secret?, New York Magazine, 7 April 2013.