Media Trends: Native Advertising

By Donya LaHaye, Mike Shriner and Carolyn Pilkington Account Supervisor, Senior Account Supervisor and Vice President, New York

Storytelling, journalism and advertising have evolved significantly over the past decade, resulting in many new tools to effectively tell stories. Accordingly, there’s been a paradigm shift in how forward-thinking agencies and clients generate content and interact with their target publics.

Native advertising, a method in which the advertiser provides content in the context of the user's experience, is the new model for advertising online. Take the recent Buzzfeed post, “15 Reasons Why Cats Are the Most Fearless Creatures,” for example. It appears similarly to other Buzzfeed content, but is actually a Target ad for pet food and toys. Another example is found in Forbes BrandVoice content, sponsored articles such as “Artistic Entrepreneurs Fuel the Creative Economy - It takes a community...,” which appear as other Forbes articles but are native ads.

Media outlets including the New York Times, FOX News and more are turning to native advertising for sponsored content that will hold viewers’ attention, and it’s an area Edelman is pushing head-first into. 

Here are some tips on how to do it successfully:

• Don’t be intrusive, but create a value exchange with consumers. Create something that people want to experience and that touches or entertains them versus something they have to endure.
• Play to a platform’s clearest and purest intention, and deliver your brand message in a way that’s organic to that platform/location.
• Participate in spaces that are authentic to the brand and to the audience.
• Be transparent when you’re advertising, not deceptive, or you break the social contract with consumers. For example, don’t try to disguise an advertorial or paid content as editorial, as 58% of people find sponsored stories misleading and lose trust in a brand as a result.
• Content is only as valuable as the strategy to push it out, which platforms you push to and who helps push it out.
• The media landscape is only going to be more cluttered. It’s increasingly important to be diligent about the story we tell, why it matters, why we have the right to tell the story, who we are telling it to and how we are telling it.