The Ultimate Guide to Native Advertising

There is probably no term that is getting greater play in the marketing space right now than “native advertising”. Heck, even the New York Times is getting in on the actionand including native advertising opportunities in their latest redesign.

There is a great opportunity in “native” for both media companies and brands, but it’s imperative to understand all the moving parts.

What Exactly Is Native Advertising?

NOTE: Personally, I had a challenging time going through all the definitions of native advertising, so I’ve done my best here to make it simple and useful.

If we want, we can get super complex about what native advertising is. The IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) created a Native Advertising Playbook that has six different categories of consideration. It’s a worthy document, but to simplify the argument, native advertising is:

• A Directly Paid Opportunity. I hate to bring out the obvious, but native advertising is “pay to play”. If a brand or individual did not pay for the spot, it’s not native advertising.
• Usually Content Based. The information is useful, interesting and highly targeted to the specific readership. So, in all likelihood, it's not an advertisement promoting the company's product or service directly.
• Delivered In-Stream. To truly be a native ad, the user experience is not disrupted. The advertising is delivered in a way that does not impede the normal behavior of the user in that particular channel.

Again, the goal of native advertising (at least for definition purposes) is to not disrupt the user experience…to offer information that is somewhat helpful and similar to the other information on the site so that the content is engaged with at a higher rate than, say, a banner ad (this is good for advertisers, and if the content is truly useful, good for consumers).

What Is the State of Native Advertising?

According to Hexagram's State of Native Advertising report:

• 62% of publishers and media companies offer some kind of native advertising program.
• 66% of brands create their own content for native advertising programs (in most other cases, the publishers assist in creating the content for the brand).
• The most popular forms of native advertising are sponsored blog posts (65%), sponsored articles (63%) and Facebook sponsored updates (56%).

Native advertising is growing as a part of content marketing for a few reasons:

1. Media brands and social platforms (like LinkedIn and Facebook) are aggressively offering native advertising products.
2. Brands now spend approximately 25 to 30 percent of their budget on content marketing initiatives. Brands have started to make this a priority, so native advertising is seen as a viable opportunity.
3. When done right, it can work.
4. There is a renewed passion in the advertising community around native. This "new advertising" (even though it's not new at all) has given hope to media buyers around the world that something can perform better than a banner ad.

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