Native Advertising

Direct from Wikipedia:

Native advertising is an online advertising method in which the advertiser attempts to gain attention by providing content in the context of the user's experience. Native ad formats match both the form and the function of the user experience in which it is placed. The advertiser's intent is to make the paid advertising feel less intrusive and thus increase the likelihood users will click on it.

Conceptually, native ads are the holy grail of advertising. Content that promotes business goals while at the same time being something that users actively want to engage with is a rare "win-win" in the world of advertisements. Pseudo-native advertising has been skulking around in forms such as product placements in television and movies, and as advertorials in magazines and online articles, and basically any product review ever written that was "sponsored" but not disclosed as such. These forms are not truly native given their propensity to remain overly intrusive and/or dishonest, and have really given what is conceptually a great idea a terrible reputation.

True native advertising starts and ends with the user experience. Take a look at your content. Who is it useful for? If it's just you, then it isn't native. Is it high quality? If you're barely excited by it you can bet your prospects won't be, and let's be honest, when is the last time a Google paid ad or a blinky flash banner that takes over the screen did anything but annoy someone. Like good lead-gen, native advertising has to put the users first. If your content isn't doing something obviously beneficial for the audience, chances are good you're wasting your ad spend.

Native advertising isn't about "sneaking" ads into legitimate content, it's about advertising in places that advertising belongs. Think of it like an animal in its proper environment. Lions belong in savannas and grasslands. Advertisements belong in certain places as well, and the places they belong the most are being overlooked because they've been around so long. Your website? That's an advertisement. Your storefront? Advertisement. Packaging? Advertisement. Packaging should be a product's greatest advertisement, and while a package only has so much room for product information, that limitation is no longer an issue with today's packaging solutions that can not only connect digitally to as much packaging info as anyone could ever want, but also can clear up space on the product itself by removing the need to print a traditional barcode. Advertising doesn't have to be shoved into user's faces. When done properly, users will choose to engage with your materials.

That's not to say that advertising only belongs directly in stores and on products, because certainly users don't spend all their time in stores looking at products or on websites with their heads buried in product research. But, the further ads stray from their natural habitat, the more effort is required to make that ad relevant to its environment - to make it native. Have we strayed onto a mobile phone? Then we'll need a native app for our native ad - and app development can be expensive. But we don't just need an app - just having the app isn't what makes an app native advertising - we need an app that has functionality. Rather than just saying how great our products are or even just easy to buy, it's got to make the user's life easier with utility, or offer enough entertainment, or monetary value to justify itself. Advertising can be made to fit just about anywhere, but not without a high level of creativity, and authenticity.

A couple things publishers and the FTC (who will drop the hammer on content providers that fail to disclose when content is "sponsored") are missing out on: consumers are agnostic about the origin of content, provided that the content is interesting and genuine. It's why a gazillion people watch the Super Bowl just for the ads, it's why they install the Starbucks app on their phones, and it's why they let Google snoop around their Gmail inbox. It's why the most memorable Hulu ad is the Fedex one that said "We bought a 30 second ad, here's your content 20 seconds sooner." It's all about WIIFM - What's in it for me. When publishers put a  "Sponsored" label on an article, it does that content a disservice from all of those users that won't click good content just to avoid advertising. It does legitimate advertising content creators a disservice when "Sponsored" content really is nothing more than bland product pitch copy - it's the lion out of the savanna dropped in the middle of a busy city street, out of place, and off putting, and ruining things for everyone else.

When Microsoft paid some producers to product place Bing in Hawaii 5-0, that wasn't authentic. No one says "Bing it," they say "Google it," and suggesting otherwise is really jarring. It's like trying to pick your own nickname - it never takes off - and you end up looking silly. However, when Microsoft got genuine for the 2014 Super Bowl ad and showed content in A) an environment where people want to see ads, and B) made it relevant to the audience by showing how their surface tablet was impacting a former NFL player's every day life - they knocked it out of the park. Compare that to the regular surface ads, where a bunch of choreographed dancers that have nothing to do with Microsoft or anything they do (and are more than anything reminiscent of Apple iPod campaigns that are over a decade old now), and you can see the stark contrast between native and traditional "look at me" advertising.

Let's take "visibility" down a notch on the priority list (but of course not OFF the list!) and put "great content that makes contextual sense" a notch or two higher. Be honest, be authentic, and users will interact with you on their own.