Native advertising in the new buzz word in the online marketing industry and there are many media professionals who got questions about the real meaning of native advertising. This is a humble try to define this new concept and then check out the various methods used for it.
Native Advertising – Definition
Native advertising is referred to the kind of paid advertising, which ensures that the ad content integrates to the site or page design effortlessly. Basically, there shouldn’t be any kind of feel of an external element in the eyes of a viewer; rather it should naturally follow the user experience by being just a apart of the native content. To describe simply, native ads are branded messages, which look like natural content.
You can see that all major media companies now use native advertising at their sites. The social media giants Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn have pioneered in native advertising model. You can now see that the leading publishers too increasingly leverage native advertising models to enhance revenues. Technological backup boosted up native advertising to deliver it in a more perfect and precise manner.
Types of Native Advertising
In fact, native advertising is a generic term with many categories and subversions. Basically, one can be broadly classify native ads to;
- Paid search units as Yahoo, Google, Bing
- In-ad native element units like the content-style ads in banner placement.
- Content recommendation units, which are the tail-end content units seen at the bottom of generic articles.
- In-feed native ad units, which is the most successful way for the brands to effectively distribute content with an objective of showing the right content to the right people at right time.
Development of Native Advertising
The media landscape is bombarded with millions of feeds and messages daily, and the real competition for the advertisers is to grab attention. There are not just personal computers, but adding to this bombardment, smart phones, laptops, tablets, net books to smart watches and even wearable put forth countless engagement opportunities for the promoters. You can witness how the traditional forms of advertising have now become less effective and getting dissolved overtime.
In order to stay ahead in the competition, brands need to be innovative and also need to offer something worthwhile to survive. At the early stages of online promotions, it was more of a kind of interruption to user experiences, but this was instantly turned away by sagacious users. It not only ended up in getting ignored by users, but also started creating negative impact on brand perception too as the users started taking the interrupters as injudicious and worthless.
This paved way to the thought of being natural without interrupting users at work, and moreover going a step ahead to enhance the user experience. To succeed with native ads, the marketers have to think like publishers in order to create interest and curiosity in their readers (customers) through worthwhile content, which they may perceive positively and share.
The concept and practices of native advertising is rapidly developing now and those who are effectively using it have already started reaping good success on the highly competitive internet platform.