Did you hear the one about native advertising?
What is native advertising and, by extension, what is it not?
Recently, the term “native advertising” has been the talk of the town in marketing and brand publications.
As consumers become more and more allergic to traditional advertising, brands and media have started teaming up to create a new form of advertising, one that basically makes the advertising look like any other content on the publisher’s side.
In a magazine, this means it looks like an article (you’re right if you say that in print, this is not new). On Facebook, it looks like a standard post. On television, it takes the form of a television show.
What makes native advertising interesting is that it combines paid and earned media, but to be effective, it has to bring value to the consumer or audience: it has to be useful.
See how nowadays, it becomes so important for a brand to be useful and respectful to its audience?
In this week’s article over at Warc, there is a lot of talk about native advertising as research firm Altimeter recently released a report called “Defining and Mapping the Native Advertising Landscape.”
This is a must read for anyone that has to market any form of product, brand, entertainment property, etc.
As more and more publishers and media platforms build their native advertising offer, your marketing plan must also start to include this type of “format” in its strategy.
First read the article linked, but put some time aside to also read the entire Altimeter report at some point (linked in the article).
