Native Ads: Balance Brand Promotion with Compelling Content
Handova agrees, stating that the best native advertising is indistinguishable from genuine journalism. “So long as the content informs or entertains the readers, even if it has a subtle slant toward the advertiser, I don’t have a problem with it,” he asserts.
Native advertising’s primary objective is to establish trust in your brand, rather than simply to sell a product. According to Miller, consumers “don’t want to be sold to anymore.” Marketers need to respect that by working on building up preference for their brands over time—a goal that native advertising can help advance.
One reason consumers are more receptive to native ads than traditional ones may lie in classical methods of communication. “Humans aren’t really made to deal with pop-up ads. In tribal societies there were no pop-up ads but there was word-of-mouth recommendation, and there were people who were news sources, and you trusted them as authorities,” Drummey says. “When [brands are] boosting a post on Facebook or sponsoring some piece of content, the more relevant it is to their audience—the more helpful or interesting it is—the more effective it will be.”
He adds that instead of measuring the success of their posts by counting impressions, brands should focus on creating valuable content. Using the example of Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black ad in The Times, he says that people who read the piece engaged with it at a deeper level than they would have with, say, a poster ad for the show. “Ads that are native tend to be better at brand lift or brand sentiment boosting, because you’re retaining it a lot more as a viewer,” he observes. Miller agrees, saying, “In most instances, you’re looking for an uptick in terms of traffic or engagement or email subscribers, but [native advertising is] also very much [about] establishing a thought leadership presence.”
In addition to building brand preference, native advertising can help companies establish themselves on a variety of outlets. One way to create such a presence—particularly when it comes to social media networks such as YouTube and Snapchat—is to tap creators who are well known on a channel as brand ambassadors, instead of simply posting the same content to different channels. These influencers will know how to translate the promotional content to their respective mediums—Drummey likens this practice to “walking into a house party with someone who knows the guests.”
Looking forward, native advertising may be a precursor to a substantial shift in the way information is circulated. Citing a decline in professional reporters and a general lack of money to source content, Handova predicts that on-demand writers—who will be “advocating at various levels for themselves and their organizations”—will increase in popularity. And this change, he notes, is neither good nor bad: “As long as everyone is fully informed of the rules of the game, this new model of information dissemination could be as or more powerful than the current paradigm.”
Assistant Editor Sam Del Rowe can be reached at sdelrowe@infotoday.com.