This week at SMX East in New York, Rebecca Lieb from Altimeter Group presented to a full house on how best to find success in the native advertising landscape.
The advertising ecosystem is continuing to grow at rapid pace — and paid, owned and earned media channels are converging. This is where the native advertising opportunity exists. So what exactly is native advertising? Here is what Rebecca had to say.
Defining Native Advertising
For many, the practice of paid and sponsored content is nothing new. However, with brands, agencies, publishers, social media platforms and technology vendors all looking to take advantage of the “convergence opportunity,” a clear definition is needed.
According to Altimeter,
“Native advertising is a form of converged media that combines paid and owned media into a form of commercial messaging that is fully integrated into, and often unique to, a specific delivery platform .” Rebecca Lieb
In other words, native advertising is an intersection of paid and owned media, where “owned” media is content that the brand or advertiser controls, while “paid” media is advertising.
In the Mashable article below, you can see how native advertising looks and note how sponsored content is clearly labeled in every appearance
The same principle applies to Facebook, where sponsored posts are clearly labeled in the news feeds.
Understanding Native Advertising – Why Native Advertising?
It is important to have a clear understanding of native advertising so marketers can identify challenges and take advantage of the growth opportunities that exist.
The main challenges that native advertising helps solve revolve around:
Banner blindness
Skipped pre-roll ads
Eroding email engagement rates
Fragmented consumer attention
Increasing level of automation in programmatic digital advertising
Downward price pressure on classic display advertising
Native advertising brings opportunity to the entire ecosystem for publishers, social platforms, brands, agencies and technologies.
Using Facebook as an example of this growing opportunity: As reported by VentureBeat, a recent study by AdRoll found that 49x more clicks where generated by News Feed ads than traditional right-side ads, at 45% less cost.
Pros
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Cons
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Planning Your Native Advertising Campaign – Seven Steps To Success
Step 1 – Transparency & Disclosure
When planning your native advertising campaign, it is important that you disclose that the placement is commercial in nature and link to policies that govern such placement. This is critical to success.
Step 2 – Build Your Content Strategy
According to Lieb, “Content is the atomic particle of marketing,” and it is essential that you put in place a foundational content strategy prior to native executions. You can read more on the evolution of the content marketing ecosystem here.
Step 3 – Collaborate
Encourage internal collaboration and incentivize external collaboration.
Ensure teams are agile, able to learn quickly, and apply what they’ve learned to other campaigns and channels.
Step 4 – Factor In Earned Media
Make sure that you factor in ways to share and amplify your message. This helps extend the campaign’s reach.
Step 5 – Track Your Content
Make sure that you track the content that most resonates in social channels. Build and regularly maintain libraries of content that break down into discrete units of text that can be deployed quickly in a variety of formats.
Step 6 – Scale
If you follow the steps above, success can be shown via scale. According to Lieb, native advertising campaigns are usually “exclusive” and cannot be reduplicated elsewhere. Many vendor solutions do scale and travel, but at the expense of being native in the strictest sense.
Step 7 – Measure
Finally, develop Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each native advertising campaign, and measure native advertising effectiveness against a converged media model.
Conclusion
Native advertising is a very effective and powerful way for brands to reach users and scale content. It capitalizes on the convergence of paid and owned media and allows you to inject campaign reach with the inclusion of owned media. It can be as simple or as complex as you wish; but either way, make sure that you really understand the concept of native advertising before you try to execute on campaigns.
Download the full Altimeter report on the Native Advertising Landscape here to learn how.
The full presentation from SMX East can also be viewed below:
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