TRIPLELIFT

TripleLift is advertising for the visual web. We cover advertising technology, display advertising, native advertising, and other advances in helping brands organically promote their content.

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Agencies Embracing Native Despite Challenges

By Michael Goldberg

Everyone’s talking native.  But when it comes to executing, agencies are typically the decision makers when it comes to selecting the advertising strategies they will employ for their clients.   As it turns out, they’ll be leveraging native advertising more frequently according to a new survey of over 100 digital media buyers across the US.

TripleLift teamed up with DMR to survey executives representing some of the industry’s biggest media buying agencies including Starcom MediaVest, MEC, Carat, Mediacom, UM, Spark, Mindshare, among others.  While individual responses on what constitutes native varied, the overarching and defining theme is that native advertising is any form of sponsored content that can be easily integrated within the look and feel of the site it lives on. 

73% of digital media buyers surveyed currently employ a native advertising strategy.  67% plan to increase the use of native in 2014 and beyond, while 26% expect their use to remain the same.  Only 7% of respondents look to scale back the use of native in the future.

Not surprisingly, the general consensus is that native advertising is effective.  68% of digital media buyers find native advertising to be valuable or extremely valuable forms of advertising.  

However, this does not come without its challenges.  There is still confusion over where to find creative, how to measure results, and how to achieve scale.  The following infograph provides a high-level summary of the results.  And you can download the full survey results to learn how agencies think of native.

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Agencies Talk Native Advertising

Agencies Talk Native from TripleLift on Vimeo.

Despite being one of the hottest trends in advertising, everyone has a unique spin on what contitutes a native ad. So how do the men and women responsible for leading advertising strategies for some of the world’s biggest brands view native? We sat down with a few of the top excutives from some of the biggest agencies to get their definiton of native advertising.

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Native a Shining Star at Cannes

By Michael Goldberg

While seemingly every major agency executive, creative director, and brand marketer is living life to the fullest on the South Coast of France, I’m siting here behind my little desk in New York City pecking away at a keyboard and merely talking about some of the buzz taking place at this year’s Cannes Lions Festival.  Mind you, I’m also enjoying some bubbly to help make it feel like I’m at an industry party.  But I digress.

Native advertising has permeated many of the discussions at this year’s festival, none more so then when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer claimed that every medium has come to embrace native as the go-to advertising solution.  Yahoo, which has been working on rebuilding its own brand for years has taken to native thanks impart to its multi-million dollar acquisition of Tumblr. Nevertheless, one of the original purveyors of the banner ad now endorsing native as the future ad model is quite a validation. 

According to Mayer:

• Viewers of native ads are 3.6 times more likely to perform a branded search than viewers of traditional display ads. • Viewers of native ads are six times more likely to do a related search. • 46 percent of millennials who noticed branded content say they consumed the content. • One-third of those millennials shared the branded content.

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Is Native Putting the Inbox on the Outs with Advertisers?

By Michael Goldberg

A new study commissioned by Millward Brown and MediaBrix reveals that 46 percent of marketers believe native advertising is an effective brand strategy, beating out email, paid search, and err, text messaging.  Really?  Text messaging?

When asked what ad types "meet their digital branding objectives," responders answered with the following: social (51 percent); native (46 percent); email (36 percent); paid search (23 percent); mobile Web (23 percent); "emotionally targeted" in-game (20 percent); mobile in-app (20 percent); programmatic (18 percent); regular in-game (14 percent); text messaging (12 percent); and ads purchased directly from websites and blogs (11 percent).

Adweek covered the results of the study last week.  It is interesting that the publication singled out email in the headline.  The story seemed to be written with the angle of native and social vs. email, when it is clear from the responses that email was not the lone tactic falling to native and social.  Why not talk about paid search, which is a monster in terms of spend it receives? 

I think the key piece of the story here is that marketers, especially those focused on branding, look to social and native, which share some qualities in their ability to be viral in nature, as the new ways for brands to build equity online.  Really, all of these channels used in synergy could be effective ways to move a consumer down the sales funnel from awareness to consideration to purchase.  I agree, it all starts with native nowadays, but every strategy has its own unique benefit. 

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Images are Creating a New Language Online

By Michael Goldberg

This week, TripleLift hosted its inaugural Visual Marketing Summit at The Eventi Hotel in New York.  Next week we take the discussion on the road to Chicago’s Wit Hotel.  Based on the turn out and the engaging discussion we saw, it’s clear there is a monumental shift in how people are communicating online. 

Visuals have become the new vocabulary online.  Whether it’s photos, memes, or GIFS, it seems images are the easiest and fastest way for us to express ourselves.   Thanks to the massive adoption of technology like smartphones, everyone has a camera at their disposal and editing technology within reach, making conversations just a bit more visual.

See, what I did there?

Fortune has dedicated an entire series to this topic.  They have penned a terrific article, though I assume it should have had some more visuals.  The author notes:

Certainly this shift towards visual communication could end up being a monumental change for society as whole, and while I hope it has as many positive implications as The Gutenberg Press, if nothing it else, it has helped us find thousands of ways to express emotions using cat pictures. 

But if you’re a brand hoping to make a statement with visual storytelling, be sure to join us in Chicago next week!

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Programmatic Advertising is Evolving, and Native Is Part of The Progression

By Eric Berry

One of the world’s most recognized brands, and biggest spenders of media, announced that it wishes to buy up to 75% of its US digital media programmatically.  Procter & Gamble said the plan will align with a similar shift of mobile-ad buying to programmatic buying - auction-based systems where ads are bought and served across the web to a specific audience in real time.  They are not alone, American Express declared a similar intent to go programmatic over the next few years.  This now gives us two of the biggest marketers, representing branding and direct response dollars respectively, shifting to a programmatic model.

It’s clear that the programmatic buying model is a very real trend that will encompass all of facets of digital marketing, from mobile to native.  Sure, it will likely take some time to perfect it and for the strategy to mature, but the future is now.  Unfortunately, many of us are too concerned with trying to define it based on their current comfort zones.

While the promise of programmatic is "omnichannel attributable RTB ", that may not truly happen for 15 years, but it's the objective. Everything short of that is just a step on the path towards this goal.  Let me dive into what this actually means…

Omnichannel allows a holistic evaluation of the aggregation of an advertiser's efforts per user in every format, to have a clear metric to evaluate the success of each different format and strategy (i.e. how do your email efforts impact your banners, which are impacted by search, etc.) Programmatic should have a unified view of all your media efforts collectively; dividing these limits programmatic to cost savings, but combining them allows your marketing efforts to collectively learn, target in the most effective format, collect and emphasize the media and messaging practices that are most effective for your brand overall.

Attributable, just like omnichannel, encounters the same issues since most marketing strategies live in silos. Some brands like Yahoo provide some degree of cross-channel attribution, but that's only within their stack. For a sophisticated brand, and a major spender of media, like P&G, how can they tell how their Yahoo display efforts, Facebook, email, search, etc. actually impacts their brand. Last touch is a terrible metric and just slightly more valuable than a random number generator. Real attribution (even for branding campaigns) means an end to the famous phrase by John Wanamaker, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Even branding, with the advent of effective studies like brand lift, viewability, and long-term attribution modeling, can benefit from an omnichannel attribution model

RTB allows an advertiser (or the buyer on its behalf), to meaningfully adapt to the spend efficacy on a per-user basis, tailor each message accordingly, control the recency and frequency of messaging, etc. It's not just about paying the right price; it's about absolute precision of marketing, across every single channel. If you just emailed someone this morning, maybe it's worth it to pay more for that user on channels where you know that user is responsive based on recent delivery, and to promote social behavior based on the recent email.  This is only possible with a pervasive RTB market. Again, RTB isn't purely about pricing, it’s about the power of per-impression messaging

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All Eyes on the Visual Web

By Michael Goldberg

Throughout time, the use of images has been prevalent in the way humans interact; it began with cavemen communicating with drawings in, well, caves – the Egyptians did it through symbols on walls, and after what seemed like an eternity, advertisers and publishers have finally returned to embracing the power of images to tell stories with the rise of the visual Web, which is made up of sites that value pictures over words.

It's no wonder why:

As the Visual Web becomes the new standard, publishers are forgoing banners and seeking more integrated native advertising experiences that align to this increasing shift away from text-heavy layouts to those leveraging beautiful imagery as the focus of their sites.  But are advertisers ready?  And what can they do to engage their audience in this visual manner?

The Industry Index by DMR, TripleLift, and a distinguished panel of industry thought leaders will explore the rise of the Visual Web and the role it’s playing in creating a more dynamic and flexible approach to digital marketing and native advertising tomorrow morning at The Eventi Hotel in NYC.  The event is sold-out, but we’ll be tweeting from the event, so follow us on Twitter and look for #visualmarektingsummit.  

For those able to attend, here’s a summary of tomorrow morning’s agenda.

  8:30 AM

Networking Breakfast

9:10 AM

Welcome

Gayle Meyers

Founder & Managing Partner, Digital Media Review

9:15 AM

Keynote

Jonathan Perelman

VP Industry Development, Buzzfeed

9:35: AM

The Visual Web

Ari Lewine

Chief Strategy Officer, TripleLift

9:45 AM

Panel Discussion

Moderator: Bethany Mach, Global Digital Director, SMV

Panelist: Craig Weinberg, North American Mobile Practice Lead, Mindshare

Panelist: Natalie Bokenham, Director of Strategy, UM

Panelist: Emily Allen, SVP Sales Development, Business Insider

For those of you in Chicago on June 12, there is still some time to join us for the second version of our visual marketing discussion. 

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A New Look at The Evolving Native Advertising Landscape

By Michael Goldberg

In just a few short years, native advertising has transformed itself from an industry buzzword into a legitimate advertising strategy employed by some of the world’s most recognized advertisers and publishers.    

Since the introduction of the banner ad twenty years ago, the average customer’s web behavior has changed dramatically.   Today, the majority of content is consumed on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, and it’s often shared with friends and family, leaving the traditional banner ad tuned out and ignored; prompting brands to explore new ways to engage their customers online. 

Native advertising has been viewed as the most effective alternative to traditional display advertising.   Whether that means leveraging branded content, integrated images, or sponsored video is up for debate.   Depending on whom you ask, everyone has a different definition for what constitutes native advertising.  Not surprisingly, the native advertising landscape can be as confusing as the definition itself.  With native taking on so many different forms, there are companies specializing in every facet of native.

To help the industry make sense of the emerging landscape, we published a visual categorization of the major players involved back in September.  Since then, we’ve seen the native advertising landscape change drastically.  So much so, we had to make some updates.   Take a look at TripleLift’s Native Advertising Landscape v2.0.

From the growth of mobile to the foray into programmatic, brands, agencies, publishers, and technology vendors are venturing into new, uncharted native territory.  No matter the type of sponsored content employed, the native ad ecosystem continues to grow and evolve. 

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Will Native Play Into CPG’s Increased Spending on Brand Advertising?

By Michael Goldberg

Despite reliance on digital for direct response campaigns, some marketers see it as an opportunity for branding; so much so that it will make up a majority of their digital spend.  Branding-focused ads will be the number 1 priority for the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry.   Because CPG brands traditionally rely on retailers to do much of the actual selling of products, direct response is not as crucial to marketing efforts as in other verticals.  According to a report by eMarketer, US digital ad spending on branding will make up 65% of total budgets vs. 35% for direct response.  So, does this mean we’ll see branding campaigns within 350 x 250 banner ads?  Not likely.

Brand marketing has the lofty goal of driving awareness and perception, which aides in conversion, but doesn’t necessarily produce it.  Branding can also have the goals of telling a story, expressing a promise or vision, and communicating a shared value.  Direct response has only one goal: to sell.  That is why branding is often more complicated than DR.  It takes much more than a “click here” or “buy now” button to engage a customer. 

With both advertisers and publishers now eager to engage in native advertising, many brands see it as a solution for brand marketing online.  Perceived effectiveness is fueling a larger investment in native advertising. In December 2013, market research company BIA/Kelsey estimated that native ad spending on social media alone would grow to $5 billion in 2017, from $3.1 billion this year. These figures represent an increase over the company’s previous forecast in April 2013. As a percentage of total social media ad spending, it projected that native would grow to 42.4% in 2017, from 38.8% in 2014.

So why is native better for brand campaigns?  Well for one, it is not ignored; banner blindness is still a very big concern for the industry.  Built into the fabric of the sites it lives, consumers are more likely to engage with native ads versus a banner.  (Though they should always be labeled as ads.)  And, consumers are more likely to share these native ads.  While not a replacement for organic social media, brands can use sponsored influence to spark conversations and gain awareness. It should not feel like an ad, meaning, you should not be selling, you should be speaking to the consumer’s interest that reflects the experience of the site they are visiting.   Because native ads tend to be more contextually relevant, this helps brands inject themselves into a person’s passions or hobbies on the sites they love.   

CPG’s share of digital spending on brand advertising will likely be mixture of native, social, and mobile, and not a reliance on banners.

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The Future of Advertising: Appliances?

By Michael Goldberg

If an ad that is perfectly integrated into the look and feel of a publisher’s site means it's native, will ads integrated into, let’s say, home appliances, constitute a form of native advertising? 

Despite some debate over the type of content that constitutes native advertising, the industry has largely agreed on the core definition that native is a form of paid media that follows the natural look and feel of the user experience on which it is served.  So, after hearing about Google’s ambition to serve ads on refrigerators, watches, car dashboards, and quite possibly toasters, blenders, the list can go on and on – does this new brave world where advertising is assimilated within everyday objects a sign of native 2.0?

Google’s letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission painted a picture of a future where ads would seamlessly be part of everyday life:

We expect the definition of “mobile” to continue to evolve as more and more “smart” devices gain traction in the market. For example, a few years from now, we and other companies could be serving ads and other content on refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities.

It seems absurd, but as technology advances and becomes more affordable, the average home will feature more and more connected devices.  We’ve seen this already happen with televisions, and that makes perfect sense, but “smart” refrigerators and thermostats? Actually, it’s not that far-fetched to have our everyday world be controlled by the Internet; it is smarter and more responsible than us.  If it can help make decisions for us based on our “learned” behavior and preferences, I’m all for it.  But the idea of seeing advertising on the side of my refrigerator is questionable. 

Appliances are not websites.  With the web, whether you like ads or not, there is an implied notion of a value exchange where you are getting tons of free content that’s supported by advertising.  But a refrigerator is entirely the property of the person who bought it.  It should not need to be “monetized.”  But assume the ads can be highly targeted and relevant - recipes delivered on our fridge, ads for tropical resorts on our thermostats in the dead of winter, etc. And, the ads resemble the function and design of the objects - does that make it any more acceptable?  Well, unless this helps offset the price of these machines, than it feels like an invasion of privacy in that wherever we turn, we’ll be fed messages to consume, conform, and obey.

Quick, someone call “Rowdy” Roddy Piper!

(Please watch They Live! if you do not get this reference!)

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For Native Advertising, Multiple Metrics Matter

By Michael Goldberg

With OMMA Native behind us, the buzz around native has only intensified.  We still have no definitive definition of what constitutes native.  The lines between advertising and content marketing remain blurred.  The debate over using programmatic to buy native is hotter than ever.  But the one thing everyone seems to agree upon is that we need to employ multiple KPIs to gauge the success of native advertising.

Addressing the sold-out crowd at the Altman Building in New York Monday morning, Edward Kim, CEO of SimpleReach, echoed a common thought among attendees; “It’s dangerous to have a singular KPI for native.”  This parallels a recent article I penned imploring marketers to go beyond the click to measure native ad campaigns. 

With native ads encompassing so many levels of consumer engagement elements—tweeting, sharing, pinning, playing, etc.—it's more important to evaluate a variety of benchmarks versus looking at clicks alone. These ads are specifically designed to ignite brand awareness and generate buzz, not directly sell a product or service. Just because someone sees an ad for a Porsche, it doesn't mean they're going to buy that car right then and there; so it's important to understand how effective these ads are at capturing a user's attention, awareness, and inclination to share that ad to a wider social network.

Marketers have stated that many of these KPIs, including engagement and sharing, are at the top of their minds for native advertising.

However, we still see many looking to the archaic CTR as the pinnacle of success of a native advertising campaign.  Unfortunately it will take more panels, more blogs, and more research to get the industry using multiple metrics.

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The Visual Web: It’s Not Just for Pinterest and Instagram Anymore

By Michael Goldberg

A picture is worth a thousand words, or more like $5 billion based on the latest valuation of visual bookmarking site, Pinterest.  The company raised a new $200 million round of funding that makes it more valuable then some small countries.  

As one of the first platforms to rely entirely on images as content, Pinterest has led a trend where visuals like photos, videos, and memes are uploaded, viewed, and shared at staggering amounts across the Web.  Digiday recently help put the notion of visual content in context with 5 simple charts.  

So have you noticed the move to visual layouts on your favorite sites?  Here are just a few examples of how some of the biggest sites in the world shifted from text to visuals.

A&E Networks

Back when Dog the Bounty Hunter was a mainstay of the network, A&E looked less like a television network and more like a blog run by a high school journalism team.

Before:

Today, users can scroll through rich visuals representing all of the network’s top shows. 

After:

Martha Stewart

Before her “legal trouble” Martha Stewart was feeling rosy.  While there was not much use of imagery, soft, warm pastels were abundant. 

Before:

Today, the focus is squarely on the crafts and recipes she is so famous for.

After:

Weather.com

There was a time when people only wanted to know if it was going to rain or not.  Back then; visuals on Weather.com were regulated to maps, and thumbnails of suns and clouds.

Before:

Today, weather is an all-encompassing lifestyle.  Weather.com has done a great job at telling weather-related stories through images, which tend to capture Mother Nature like no writer could describe.   

After:

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The Power of Visual Content [Infographic]

By Michael Goldberg

From the beginning of time, images have been at the center of human interaction; it began with cavemen communicating through drawings in, well, caves – the Egyptians did it through symbols on walls, and after what seems like an eternity, advertisers have finally returned to embracing the power of images to tell brand stories.  It’s no wonder why, in today’s fast paced society, an image can resonate with consumers on many different levels.  Here’s a visual summary of the power of visual content. 

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Is It Native?

By Michael Goldberg

If you work in digital, chances are you’re familiar with the term native advertising. What started out as another buzzword has quickly turned into a popular and effective marketing strategy leveraged by some of the world’s biggest advertisers and publishers. 

While many still debate what constitutes a native advertising campaign, everyone tends to agree on the basic definition; it’s advertising that follows the format, style, and voice of whatever platform it appears in.  Essentially, native advertising should be something that is naturally built in to the user experience, rather than be intrusive. 

It’s a great concept when properly executed.  But the notion of native advertising is not limited to digital.  It’s all around us, staring at us in our everyday lives.  Can you guess which of these examples fits the core definition of native advertising? 

With out further ado, it’s time to play Is it Native?

Sweet Ride!

You may be familiar with one of the amusement park staples, the sky ride.  Well, not so much a ride as it is a way to take lazy people from one side of the park to another without having to walk.  Not surprisingly, this ride was sponsored by M&Ms at Six Flags Great Adventure.  The ad simply functions as part of the vehicle and never impedes the rider experience.  Is it Native?

Who’s On First?

Back during the Toby Parker Spider-Man era, Major League Baseball tried to drum up interest for the film, and additional revenue, by introducing bases sporting ads for Spider-Man 2.  The traditionally austere, white base adorned the film's logo based on the action hero's web, and covered a good portion of the base.  Is it Native?  (Hint: The New York Yankees balked at the idea and the distraction it may cause to players, and MLB never tried this again.)

Walk This Way

When advertisers wanted to experiment with new real estate for their ads, they simply looked down.  In the battle for eyeballs, no stone is unturned, and no surface is ignored.  In the past decade, we’ve seen a trend towards very clever advertising on staircases, and escalators.   These ads immediately pop, and grab the attention of consumers, but they never stop them from going about their daily routine.  Is it Native?

The Girl With the Doggone Tattoo

File this under what the #$*%? A few years ago, a Utah woman sold ad space on her forehead for a cool $10k. (I can only imagine what the CPMs for this would be?) It does not get much more native than advertising on your body, right?  Well, sporting a built-in logo for an online casino is not exactly a natural look and feel, and chances are if you meet this woman, you won’t be able gawk at her forehead and pay attention to anything she has to say at the same time.  Is it Native?

So, how did you do?  Stay tuned for more editions of, Is It Native?  Promotional consideration paid for by The Native Advertising Primer. 

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What is the Visual Web and Its Implications for Marketers?

Ahead of the LDV Vision Summit in New York City, presenting speaker, Eric Berry, offers an introduction on this hot topic.

By Eric Berry, CEO & Co-founder of TripleLift, a native advertising company for the visual web

The visual web represents a change in how people consume content online and how brands interact with their customers. At its core, it represents the confluence of several important trends.

In defining the visual web, we explore each of these trends and discuss how they contribute to an amazing new opportunity.  I’ll be diving into this topic at full length at the LDV Vision Summit in New York City on June 4th.  You can register and learn more here.

Image Consumption

Users are producing and consuming more visual content than ever before, from Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram to Pinterest, StumbleUpon and online commerce generally. It’s no accident that more and more websites, including eBay and USA Today, are starting to look like Pinterest. People respond viscerally to images far more than they respond to text. One study shows that photo posts on Facebook generate 53% more likes and 104% more comments than the average post [1]. As many as 70% of all likes are related to photos [2]. More images mean more user engagement across the web.  Publishers are realizing the benefits of increasingly visual layouts, and the transition to a more image-driven web is underway. The Social Web

The Internet is social, and everything is shared. Consumers are interacting with brands’ content at an unprecedented rate - liking, sharing, posting on Tumblr, pinning, and more. A single image from a brand can be pinned to Pinterest, that pin can be liked on Facebook, then a friend posts to Tumblr about the product. Finally, someone is inspired to buy the product. What was once a static piece of content on a brand’s page is organically exposed to thousands of friends and followers. A friend or influencer validating a product can be an incredibly powerful driver of branding and sales – one study showed over 15% of sales were influenced by friends and family on social media [3]. By understanding this tremendous stream of data, brands can understand what products, looks, and concepts resonate with their customers. Content Curation

Technology has transformed web users from passive consumers of content into active curators and creators of content. Tastemakers and influencers are readily born by finding and sharing interesting content in one of the many simple publishing platforms on the web. For visual content, the options are myriad, including Pinterest, Tumblr, Polyvore, Instagram, and many more. Curators find and drive engagement by identifying top content and posting it in their own forums. Brands that actively curate their products and understand the user feedback benefits through increased exposure and more insights about user behavior. Brands on the Visual Web

Nearly every successful website has moved to predominantly visual layouts. Even Twitter, through photos and filters, has embraced the trend to the extent a text-first site can. All data points to a future where yet more images are consumed and shared across the web. Brands should create the content fit to be shared on this visual web and actively follow and respond to the signals. This will create a rapid product marketing and evolution cycle, keeping customers engaged and optimizing product decisions.

Sources: 1. Photos on Facebook Generate 53% More Likes Than the Average Post, Nov. 15, 2012 [http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33800/Photos-on-Facebook-Generate-53-More-Likes-Than-the-Average-Post-NEW-DATA.aspx] 2. The growing importance of digital photo sharing to brands, July 25, 2012 [http://www.qubemedia.net/tag/photo-sharing-statistics/] 3. Social Media Influences Impluse Purchases, Oct. 7, 2012 [http://strategicsalesmarketingosmg.wordpress.com/2012/10/07/social-media-influences-impluse-purchases/]

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Native Advertising: Quality Versus Quantity

by Erik Seide

There has been a lot of discussion on whether native advertising in its current form will be able to scale efficiently enough to satisfy advertising demands.  The question is: will quality, the key component that native currently employs, be able to grow without diminishing returns? 

While this demand is changing the way that people are designing their websites, the sponsored-content friendly sites still only have limited space for these advertisements, while traditional banner advertisements can be added easily throughout the fringes of a page in numerous quantities.  Publication eMarketer predicts that native advertising would hit around $2.85 billion in spend by 2014 which is still dwarfed by the $4.3 billion in spend they predict. 

Yet as the demand for this higher quality inventory increases and native starts to increase scale, native needs to ensure that it doesn’t hit the same banner fatigue that current display has reached.  The biggest value of native is the ability for this advertising to make a truly valuable impact for both consumers and advertisers.  Consumers get actually relevant advertising served in a visual and site-integrated fashion while advertisers get high-quality users that are actually interested in what is being advertised.  Triplelift has found that users who click a native advertisement spend three times as long on an advertiser’s site, navigate to twice as many pages within the site, and have a bounce rate three times lower than a user who navigates from a display ad.

The key for native is to find ways to increase the scale without diluting the quality message.  This needs to be done not by just adding more native ads to a page much like how display has increased its scale but by looking to increasing the amount of sites that will integrate to native.  This will take some time, as many current sites with display banners aren’t engineered yet to work well with the image-friendly native advertising.   Although with time, as native advertising becomes the standard with many of the most trafficked websites those other small to medium sized sites should adapt as well.  Much higher CPMs than traditional display paired with advertising that their visitors will enjoy, should be more than enough to help them migrate to the native world.

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Native Advertising: A Natural Market Evolution

by Erik Seide

The popularity of native advertising has grown significantly over the past year with large online industries such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all creating there own versions.  Yet, native advertising is not new in the marketing world and in reality is just an example of the normal evolution that has always occurred within the realm of marketing. 

When you go to the cereal isle of a grocery store and see a coupon machine giving you $1 off a certain brand, you don’t deem that as intrusive.  You might believe that the store put that machine there as a convenience to you but in fact, a brand paid top dollar to integrate itself within your purchasing experience.  This is the model that online native should try to emulate, where instead of putting an intrusive banner ad on a website (the grocery store equivalent of putting up a huge sign that says look at me and buy my product) you are putting a suggestive message that is meaningful, seamless, and useful.  As long as the native ad is clearly marked as advertising then how would this be any different than what stores have been doing for decades? 

Much like how companies and TV networks evolved advertising from traditional 15/30-second commercials to in-content product placement, advertisers and publishers are experiencing this same innovation online.  Publishers are going from the disruptive billboard type banner advertisements to a more seamless native approach.  This is allowing publishers to build advertising space that will fit the site image and site experience they had always hoped to create.  Advertisers are able to become far more visual and impactful with their messages as well as being able to go beyond the traditional three banner advertising sizes to fit this new custom advertising space.

All of these innovations will lead to a much better experience for not only the users visiting these native sites but also for the publishers and advertisers who can be fueled by the ability to be creative and unique in this new space