Native Ads: Balance Brand Promotion with Compelling Content

Using the example of an online publisher, Miller explains why it’s so crucial for native ads to blend in. “If the ad does not fit in well with the editorial content, both the publisher and the brand get hurt—they fail to accomplish their mission of building trust and credibility,” he says. “If you’re the publisher and I’m the reader, [and the ad does not fit in well], you’ve annoyed me, to some extent—I’m thinking, why is this here, it doesn’t belong here, and it’s interrupting my otherwise good experience. [The ad and the editorial content] have to belong together.” And algorithms cannot determine whether an ad and content belong together, he says: “It has to be a human being making that decision.”

It is also essential to clearly label native advertisements as sponsored content to establish credibility for both advertiser and host platform. “It behooves everybody to label it correctly as advertising because you’re looking to build trust and credibility—if you, as so much advertising does, try to trick people into consuming something, you’ve created a negative, not a positive,” Miller says. He adds that the best way to avoid controversy around native advertising is to have a sense of ethics—and common sense. “If it’s not clear that you’re taking money to promote something—especially if you’re a really powerful media organization—then you’re crossing an ethical line,” he says.

Drummey agrees, saying, “If an influencer or an Instagrammer is posting for your brand, or if you are doing an article for The New York Times, you have to label it as a sponsored post. At any point where you’re doing something sponsored, you have to disclose it in some way.” He adds that the more naturally an organization discloses that a piece of content is sponsored, the more effective it will be, because it will work to establish an organic style of communication instead of serving as a visual distraction.

While organizations need to take care to label native ads as such, they should also recognize that while some people are hypersensitive to advertisements, others might read a piece of content and then, upon realizing it’s an ad, feel deceived. According to Drummey, Millennials tend to be “so sensitive to advertising that they see right through it,” but that there will always be segments of the population who believe that a native ad is “too close to the real thing.” To navigate a wide range of public responses to ads, creating clearly marked yet compelling content for your native ads is essential, Drummey says: “If you’re doing [native advertising] right, people know it’s an ad, but they still enjoy the content.”