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Native Advertising

Should publishers go native?

July 19, 2014 | 4 min read

Dale Lovell, content and publishing director, Adyoulike UK says publishers shouldn't fear native advertising and offers his thoughts on the benefits and opportunities it presents to the industry.

Many online publishers are still wary of stepping into the native advertising space, which makes me wonder if they have been blinded by the fear of audience backlash and regulatory intervention.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is looking hard at disclosure and publishers not labelling ads clearly enough. There have been many situations where the blurred lines between editorial and commercial content have been criticised. It’s also far from helpful when the BBC’s Robert Peston publically labels native ads as “a terrible Orwellian Newspeak phrase”.

The whole point of branded, native content is that it fits seamlessly onto the publisher’s site, but at the same time it has to be clearly labelled as ‘promoted’, ‘sponsored content’ or equivalent.

However, publishers shouldn’t let the negativity stop them from getting on board with native advertising. As was noted in a recent New York Times article, for example, “[Native] ads, Yahoo hopes, will attract the attention of more readers and make more money for the company”. In December last year, the NYT itself gave some insight into its own plans for native advertising.

This new approach to advertising is especially valuable given the financial challenges facing the media industry. Publishers and advertisers actually have the same commercial goal: to generate interesting, relevant content that audiences will find valuable and links they’ll want to click on. Like other forms of digital advertising, native ads can be geo-targeted, contextual and relevant based on previous content the visitor has engaged with – all of which help to make their value even greater.

Furthermore, publishers and brands alike can get full reporting metrics for their own native ad campaigns. There are good examples of publishers getting it right; for example Conde Nast recently drafted an internal 'Magna Carta' for native advertising to codify the tactics and ensure its partners don’t fall into any problems around advertising disclosure.

In that article, Elizabeth Line also points out that branded content doesn’t compromise (or even have to involve) the editorial team – if they don’t want to use copy or video provided by advertisers directly, publishers have access to bloggers, freelancers and other providers who know their style, aesthetic and tone of voice.

Of course, one of the key benefits when a publisher utilises a third-party native advertising technology platform is that it operates independently from the publisher’s CMS systems. This allows for full ad-traffic operations and also ensures the continued ‘divorce’ of church and state, or sales and editorial, within publishing houses.

The adoption of a third party native advertising platform means that there’s no need for any of the editorial staff – in-house or freelance – to be involved from a publisher’s point of view. All of a sudden the ‘blurred lines’ that are so often bandied about as objections to going native from publishers, suddenly don’t seem so blurred after all, do they?

The question really isn’t whether publishers should go native or not, but how and why? No digital publisher today should ignore the opportunity that native advertising offers them. Publishers need to ignore the naysayers out there and recognise the benefits they stand to gain by going native: these new ad units facilitate the ongoing monetisation of existing website traffic and work across all platforms – mobile, tablet and desktop – in a way that traditional banner ads have been trying for years and yet still cannot hope to match. And there are some really great examples of successful native ads out there. The New York Times’ recent ad created for Netflix’s Orange is the New Black has received acclaim from both journalists and the public. It’s all about getting it right.

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