Native advertising is a largely confusing concept now to many online advertisers and majority of the products labeled as “native ads” really don’t live up to expectation. It is a fact that whenever a particular technology gets a hype, the expectations on it also become unreasonable and the downsides of it get underplayed. More than anything, there will be a lot of confusions out there about what is considered as good performance, which is same in case of native ads too.
So, here we are trying to look into the major aspects of native advertising as its benefits, drawbacks, and the most effective modes of native ad placement.
Native advertising
We will start with a negative statement as “in fact there is no such true thing exist as a native ad”. Most of the stories you may have heard about natives will be partially true as this term has no exact single meaning. To be more specific, native ad doesn’t exist as a custom package solution, but it is a collection of many marketing products, which form part of the units of native ads.
One of the official definitions for native advertising is “It’s a form of paid media in which the ad gels up into a natural user experience with effective placement”. In technical terms, native ads are simply extension of the website or an app. They largely defer from the interrupting ads like flash banners, interstitial ads, and autoplay videos. Instead, native ads get placed within the properties of the form and content of the site, which offers a cohesive experience.
Knowing the above fact, the key question is how a web publisher can effectively integrate native ads as each web property defers from one another?
In real, native ads follow various methods and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Suppose if you have a news site, native ad placement can be done through sponsored content in which the brands will practice a journalistic approach. If it’s a microblogging site where short messages are shared, the brands can try promote their messages to a particular segment. On a search engine, the brands can bid on premium search placements.
The fundamental doubts of an advertiser may revolve around “how to create content which can capture the interest of the target audience by being within the context of a publishing space?’
This is in fact much harder than how it sounds. Brands have already gotten burned countless times on social media. The basic challenges for advertisers while designing native ads are to;
q Extend the user experience of a site or app
q Try to create a cohesive experience with the property’s content
q Capture attention of target users
q Clearly label and
q Enable the brands to easily communicate with the users
It should be noted that a content fails to meet the context is always perceived as an interruption, which instead of getting monetized, may ultimately spoil the brand image. So, it is not just the native ad placement which counts, but also the content design of native ads should also go along well with the context of the parent site.
