In the internet media world, “native advertising” is all the rage. Native ads are ads that have enough content to be interesting to readers, and are more organically embedded in the content of the website. In other words, advertorials rather than intrusive banner ads. Some people complain that native advertising breaches the editorial wall, and others say that such breaches are the only way for publishers to make money online. There is truth to both sides of that argument.
But editorial purity is not the point of this post. Instead, I want to focus on how the success of native advertising shows that, yet again, content is king. When you read about how and why native advertising is working (like here and here), you’ll see it constantly described as great content you want to read, as adding value to consumers, etc. Native advertising works to the extent that the content is actually good. Because what consumers care about is content.
Or, in the context of an advertising agency, creative is king. If you want to produce good content, you have to have good creative people doing the producing. I think that the real development here is not native vs. non-native, but rather that marketers and their ad agencies are finally putting serious creativity into online advertising.
Since the beginning of the online era, I’ve felt that the main problem with banner ads was not that they were intrusive, but that they sucked. Nobody put any creativity into them. Partly that was driven by size – there just isn’t enough real estate to do much with them – but partly it’s because online campaigns aren’t the glory campaigns in an agency. TV is where the glory is earned for ad execs. TV commercials win awards and get talked about. Online, on the other hand, is boring. It’s basically direct mail, for god’s sake.
Native ads, however, are larger and have a variety of possible formats. There is room for far more creativity than you have in banners. It’s still not a super bowl TV spot, but it’s a much broader canvas than a banner ad. Moreover, with so much of advertising budgets shifting to online, web advertising is getting more respect within agencies, and so top people are working on the web ads.
Yes, native ads are in the middle of the content, but that isn’t their innovation. Their innovation is in size and flexibility, which enables creativity. Thus, the real key to native is that it gives marketers room to focus on quality. And when quality work is done, people pay attention.
Thoughtbasket 