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What is Native Advertising?

Picture of Honcho Honcho : Mar 3, 2016 10:02:40 AM

I’ve heard the term “Native advertising” a lot recently and it seems to be a buzzword of the moment. Its pure definition is an advertisement that is specifically made to look like part of the environment that it appears in. It’s a new thing and innovative and it’s one of the digital trends in marketing that must be tried, right? Not always. You see when I were a young lad, native advertising was an advertorial you saw in the newspaper. That concept has been on-the–line for a long time, but now evolved far out of the term Advertorial and into something completely different such as ‘sponsored content’ or just ‘ad’ or ‘integrated package’ or more thesaurus driven terms if you care to look these up. We are actually very used to native ads, they are everywhere: Google PPC Ads are by definition a native ad (they look just like the search engine results), Facebook Newsfeed Ads are by definition a native ad (often you have to search for the ‘sponsored’ word in the corner, now made more muddy by also being near the word ‘suggested’), same for Twitter and the list goes on. Native advertising is not just text or display it can be a video or piece of content of course. It can pop-up anywhere. It’s just marketers trying to make advertising not look like, or seem like, advertising that’s all. It’s an indirect way to get the message across – you are being sold to without you knowing it, which then leads into content marketing and is that not the sole purpose of what is deemed content marketing? After all the very raison d’etre of marketing is to sell something… By doing this we are not blurring the lines between advertising and editorial, but erasing it so that everything everywhere becomes editvertising, or rather and much better advertorial. So there you have it “Native advertising” is just one of those catch-all terms (that was born out of something specific) that is used rather sweepingly. This form of marketing is imperative in the mix, however is tough to perfect in form, placement or bias. Get in contact for a chat to find out if and how you can get more for your investment. What did you say about programmatic?