by 0 Commets 0 Shares

The Native Advertising Summit Has Arrived

summit header
It’s game time folks. 2012 saw a constantly escalating amount of conversation and coverage about the native ad market. In 2013, we’re going to start providing some answers. We’d like to officially announce The Native Advertising Summit.

The Summit, which will be held on February 27 at the Standard-High Line in New York City, is the first conference dedicated to defining and discussing the future of native advertising. And the timing could not be better.  With over 25 speakers from top brands (GE and Citi), publishers (AOL and Vice), agencies (MediaCom and OMD), and platforms (Tumblr and Pandora), the Summit will offer substantive discussions on some of the most pressing issues facing native ad industry: scale, branded content, mobile and editorial standards.  Each topic will be discussed by leaders in the field and broken down into digestible segments.

If you just can’t wait until the Summit, have no fear. Over the next few weeks we will preview each panel, the panelists, as well as highlight a few successful native ads campaigns. Until then, feel free to follow Summit news on Twitter: @NativeAdSummit.

See you in New York.

by 0 Commets 0 Shares

Yesterday Was Officially “Mock Native Advertising Day”

On Monday, The Atlantic ran a sponsored post from the much-maligned Church of Scientology, which was subsequently picked up by Gawker, mocked, and shared across the interwebs.  Since then, The Atlantic has pulled down the post, but not before spoofs appeared on The Onion and TechCrunch, among others.  While the entire web used yesterday as “Mock Native Advertising Day”, we wanted to use our blog to do the opposite. Instead of focusing on why this particular sponsored post was received so poorly, we wanted to highlight a few publishers (including The Atlantic) and brands that have implemented sponsored content in a meaningful way. In a new category like native advertising, mistakes will happen, but growing pains are bound to happen in every industry.

The most important part of successful sponsored content integration, whether it’s a video, post or another format, is that it is relevant to the publisher’s audience.  A post about Scientology may not work for The Atlantic, but on other sites it may be the perfect piece of sponsored content. With that in mind, below are five pieces of sponsored content that were excellent matches for the audiences of the respective publications in which they appeared:

Mashable/IBM – The Rise of Mobile Shopping
Audience: Business professionals, entrepreneurs, technology enthusiasts

 

Coca-Cola’s “Happiness Is” Tumblr
Audience: Teens, young professionals, females

 

The Atlantic/IBM – Why Social Media Matters For Your Business
Audience: Business professionals, marketing managers, social media enthusiasts, technology enthusiasts

 

 Men’s Journal/Land Rover – Remote & Refined
Audience:  Males, affluent individuals, car enthusiasts

 

Slate/Mini – Hipster Roadtrip
Audience: Males, entrepreneurs, affluent individuals

 

by 0 Commets 0 Shares

Forbes Insights Report – Native Video Content is Gaining Steam

Two diverging media phenomenons are impacting how marketers are advertising online: Branded video content growth and the demise of interruptive media tactics.  As we have discussed in length on this blog before, ‘native advertising’ has emerged as a solution to the convergence between quality brand video content, and the changing media ad consumption habits of consumers.

Now, we have some pretty compelling research to back up that claim.

Over the past few months, our research team partnered with the Forbes Insights team to survey 136 marketing executives from leading brands such as Intel, JetBlue, Heineken, Honda, & K-Swiss to assess the market’s appetite for native advertising and branded video content. It turns out that branded content and native advertising have a ton of supporters.

Here are a few of them:

“Consumption has changed, and advertisers will have to continue to follow [consumers]. Quality has become more important now.” — Ron Amram, Senior Media Director, Heineken USA

“If you do something that’s exciting and relevant, you can far expand your media spend in terms of its impact.” —Matt Jarvis, Partner and Chief Strategy Officer, 72andSunny

“We’ve gone beyond  the thought of interactive digital into creating our own digital content wholesale.” — Marty St. George, SVP, Marketing and Commercial Strategy, JetBlue

In addition, many of the largest online platforms have been first on board to adopt native advertising (including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, StumbleUpon and WordPress). So while the term ‘native’ ads is still growing among marketing executives, a majority of them value the attributes of ‘native’ video:

With 32% of CMOs saying they have bought or are planning to buy native video advertising in the next 6 months, we invite you to download the full report here.

by 0 Commets 0 Shares

Native Advertising RoundUp: Lessons Galore for Publishers, Advertisers and Developers

Ask and you shall receive. For those in need of a quick 101 on native advertising, we’ve created an animated GIF sequence to bring you fully up to speed. PandoDaily published it this week and you can find it right here:

PandoDaily – Native Ad Part Deux: The Growth of Open Native Advertising

In addition to the Pando piece, there were actually some other articles published this week on the subject of native advertising. We’ve broken out this week’s highlighted articles by key segments of the larger native advertising ecosystem: publishers, advertisers, and developers. As a whole, these groups have the ability to accelerate change within the online advertising world, and as they find new ways to work together through native ads, we will see an internet that looks cleaner, feels more natural, and is less interruptive.

1) For publishers, our very own Dan Greenberg discussed how they can best organize and build out native ad strategies. While many of the “new web” content publishers have already begun to embrace native, many of the old guards are still wrestling with how to seamlessly incorporate it within their web properties. With those publishers in mind (as well as newer entrepreneurs), we created a four-part strategy for successful native integration:

1. Creating an “open” native experience at the outset, then build out “closed”
2. Use a native friendly user interface (grids, galleries, streams)
3. Build with brand content innovators in mind
4. Provide sophisticated analytics to track engagement

TechCrunch- 4 Pro Tips For Publishers Building a Native Ad Strategy

2) For advertisers, Ad Contrarian focused on the flaws with display advertising strategy and the overstated importance of media science.  The article argues that display ads, despite becoming more contextually relevant, are inherently flawed.  That flaw comes from their actual location, or physical property.  In other words, all the the fancy media science around consumer behavior is of little importance if the advertisements are ignored from the start.

While knowing what people want to focus on is helpful, it cannot make up for the interruption or misplacement that are inherent characteristics of display.

To the Ad Contrarian, there are really only two types of advertisements: visible (delivered within the content) and invisible  (display).

Ad Contrarian – Invisible Advertising

3) For developers, Forbes tackled an issue that has lived in Silicon Valley for a while now: Programmers despise online advertisements.  So, what is their beef?  Well, they believe that many of the Silicon Valley “geniuses” are no longer focusing on how to improve their products. Instead, they are now focusing only on how to monetize their sites through display advertising, and it is affecting the quality of the applications and products that are being created. To programmers, their solution to this monetization issue is for large platforms like Facebook to simply sell access to their “social graphs” instead of advertising.  In their minds, this would allow developers the creative freedom to build cool stuff. What the sale of that “social graph” actually looks like (and how that makes money), is not completely clear, but what is clear is that developers seem to be missing the importance of advertising as an important (and proven) monetization tool.  Advertisements do work … well the ones that aren’t interruptive.  So instead of bashing them, these developers should be working to create a better, more native, digital advertising experience for all users.

Forbes - Why Do Programmers Hate Advertising So Much?

What these three articles highlight is that native advertising has now infiltrated all three major groups of web professionals – from product promoters to content creators. While we have not reached the pinnacle of display ad frustration, we are seeing an increase in native advertising discussions across the board.  And that makes for exciting times, my friends.

Natively,

Your Sharethrough Team

PS – In late breaking native ad hiring news, Tumblr recently announced its hiring of Groupon sales exec Lee Brown. Congrats Lee!