Native Advertising

The Essential Guide

Dale Lovell

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780749481179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Native advertising: paid-for media that looks and behaves like the content around it. It affects us all. If you own a smartphone, use social media or read content online, you will have been exposed to it - often without realizing. Influenced by digital trends such as mobile advertising, programmatic advertising, ad-blocking, fake news and artificial intelligence, native advertising is a multibillion-dollar industry. It is central to the digital success of many leading brands and companies.This comprehensive study by one of the industry's foremost authorities explores the rise of this exhilarating new channel - its impact on the digital media space, and what marketers and businesses need to know about it. Native Advertising explores the future of digital advertising and explains why its growth is inevitable, using real-life examples and interviews from marketing leaders around the world and a range of case studies including The New York Times and The Independent. Native Advertising goes beyond sponsored posts on Facebook, promoted tweets and BuzzFeed branded articles. It looks at the heart of the matter: audience, budget, content and success measurement. It is full of first-hand advice for any marketer wanting to make the most of digital innovation.

PART ONE

What is native advertising?

01

What is native advertising?

A definition

Native advertising is a form of paid media where the advertisement is relevant to the consumer experience, integrated into the surrounding content and is not disruptive.

Native advertisements look and feel like the content that surrounds them. They are described as native because the advertising looks and behaves just like the editorial content around it. The ads sit within the editorial feed sections of websites and the ad works in the same way as existing editorial; for example, you normally will have to click on the content in order to interact with it.

02

Introduction

My story

It was early in 2012. My business partner, Francis Turner, and I were sat in our office in Windsor, just outside London, where we ran our content and distribution start-up, Content Amp. We had launched in 2010 and it was completely self-funded by the two of us. We had nine or ten employees at the time – all recent graduates – huddled into a small office space that was probably only really suitable for half that number. It was very much a startup’s start-up.

Our business focused on creating content on behalf of brands and helping them distribute and share it to relevant blogs and publications. It was a business that was part content marketing, part blogger outreach, part influencer marketing and part search engine optimization. We were profitable and growing. But we also recognized the limitations of content creation – it was difficult to scale, particularly with no investment or funding behind us. We loved the content marketing space and were passionate about the market, but we were looking for something to set us apart, to help us grow.

Then we discovered native advertising. Or rather Francis did. It was Francis who regularly kept his eye on emerging US advertising trends, not me. He shared some online marketing articles with me from the US that were littered with a new phrase: native advertising. We ran through the articles together. Both of us had over 10 years’ digital marketing experience – Francis in ad sales, ad tech and ad networks, myself in digital content, publishing and digital marketing. We read more and more, researched and discussed.

We both instinctively understood the mechanics of this native advertising world: we could see how the advertising was created, why it had developed and how it fitted in with the wider content marketing trend in digital that we were a part of. Crucially with our backgrounds in ad tech, content and publishing, we could see the fit for our business – and the huge opportunity, too.

We were excited. It seemed the perfect fit to our partnership – content with advertising; creativity with network-level scale. The more we researched, the more we liked. We realized quickly that despite being one of the most digitally savvy and advanced advertising markets on the planet, no one was talking about native advertising in the UK. No one was making a move in the space. After a few short months of investigating, we decided to pivot our business towards native advertising. So began my adventure.

Things moved quickly from there. We needed technology to develop the native proposition in the UK. We had our single developer in the business look into it in more detail. We went out looking for venture capital – meeting scores of would-be investors along the way. Everyone we met liked the proposition, but we got the feeling most of them were a little apprehensive about such a new market.

But one of the venture capitalists we met with, Philippe Herbert from Banexi Ventures (now Kreaxi) in Paris, happened to be the initial investor in ADYOULIKE, a Paris-based native technology platform that was really championing the native advertising space in France. They were on our radar.

We agreed to meet. In co-founders Julien and Yohan we immediately had a rapport. We saw in them some like-minded entrepreneurs that spoke exactly the same language as we did on native advertising. They, like us, recognized the amazing market opportunity. After a few more months of getting to know each other, our businesses, and some negotiations, of course, Content Amp became ADYOULIKE. That was in March 2014.

In the process we created the UK’s first – and Europe’s leading – in-feed native advertising technology company. Since then we have helped grow the European market for native advertising to become close to a $10 billion-a-year industry. With offices in Paris, London and New York, our business – from humble beginnings as plucky start-ups in France and the UK – now operates in a burgeoning global market at the cutting edge of marketing, advertising and technology.

But the really exciting part is that the native advertising market is still only in its infancy. Native advertising impacts all of our lives: anyone with a smartphone almost certainly interacts with native advertising on a daily basis. The native advertising market is estimated to be worth $59 billion by 2018 and $85.5 billion by 2020. It is the medium all advertisers will need to adopt – and understand – over the coming years for success.

Native advertising: digital’s indigenous ad format

I believe that ‘native advertising’ – although the term comes from the advertisement matching the look and feel of the editorial surrounding it, in that it is native to the publication it sits on – is actually better used as a term to describe the advertising format that is indigenous – native – to online. Native advertising is digital’s ad format. I am convinced of that.

Think about it. Banner ads were essentially adopted by early websites to replicate the standard ad blocks seen in newspapers. A banner says, ‘This is where the ads can sit – in these standard block units.’ Video ads, even still today, are quite often repurposed TV ads. All are formats that came before the advent of the internet.

Native advertising is different. Like the digital medium itself, native ads take elements from other media, but utilize them correctly for the digital world. Native advertising in my opinion is the first ‘native’ advertising format of the digital world. We are barely 20 years into mass internet usage, and far, far less for mobile browsing; in my mind, native advertising is the format all future digital advertising will take. This book will show you why and how.

The journey of digital advertising

Native advertising is in part a consequence of and reaction to some major digital consumer trends – mobile, social media, video, content, ad blocking, the decline in print, and many smaller and subtler changes. Within this book I will look to touch upon them all – and more. We’ll get into the nittygritty heart of what you need to know about running a native advertising campaign yourself. But we’ll also look at issues such as fake news, ad fraud and the wider digital media economy – issues that are not specific to native advertising, but areas that you need to know if you are trying to understand the spirit of native advertising.

It’s only when you look at the journey that digital has taken over the last 20 years that it all suddenly clicks into place. So when it came to writing a book about native advertising, I quickly realized that in order to tell the story of native advertising properly – and if I was to succeed with the aim of fully explaining why it’s important, and why its success as a medium is inevitable – I would need, in part, to tell the story of digital as a whole, too.

For some people native advertising is the solution that digital publishing has been waiting for – the format that will transform the fortunes of struggling digital publishing business models and usher in a new golden age in publishing. For others it’s a symbol of the death of publishing as we know it, the death of editorial independence and the last-ditch – ‘dead cat bounce’ – effort of an industry that has been searching for a business model for 20 years or more, and failing.

Evolution not revolution

But native advertising is fundamentally not a revolution in advertising – despite what many vested interests may try and tell you. It’s an evolution. It is a medium bo...