Welcome to the final course in the digital advertising specialization, Native Advertising. I'm especially excited about this course because I believe that native advertising is one of the most effective advertising platforms there is. What's even better is that it requires very little creative. That means we're not going to have to worry about graphic design, photos, videos, and so on. It's easy to create and even easier to implement. We take a whole class to talk about native because we feel strongly that it's one of the most promising new forms of digital advertising. Spending on native has more than doubled since 2016. It continues to rise in double digits. You can see that native advertising already represents 62.7% of all digital advertising spending. We feel that the industry investment in native is a sign that it drives results. And in fact, when I talk to folks in industry, native commonly comes up as one of the most effective tactics there is. It's the one that drives conversions with relatively low costs. Technically, there are many different types of native advertising. For instance, we've already covered social media which spans in feed ads and custom sponsored ads. For this lecture, we're going to cover three new types of native advertising. Sponsored content, content recommendation widgets, and in-article ads. In my years of studying this stuff, the basic terminologies used to define these types of ads has changed. And of course, there are no clear definitions. Not to further complicate this, but programmatic native advertising platforms can actually deliver many of these types of content at once or simultaneously. This even further blurs the lines. That being said, don't get hung up on the names or definitions. We'll cover content one at a time and show you how to execute. There are many different players in the native space. We're going to focus on two that we've worked with and enjoyed, Nativo and Taboola. This is not to say that each platform isn't great. We just haven't had the opportunity to work with them all directly yet. We've done a bit of research, and here are some major players that you might want to consider. In this course, we're going to dive deeper into Taboola and Nativo. So what is native advertising? The word native here implies that the advertisement itself is designed to go along with the style and design of the content that it appears on. So whatever site the consumer is visiting, at that time, the ad camouflages itself to that design. If a consumer is visiting AOL.com, the native ad will look just like a story on that site. The same goes for MSN.com, or BuzzFeed.com or even the New York Times. Think of it as camouflaged ads. With this ability comes controversy. That being said, I feel that native can be used ethically. We'll get into the ethics of this later in this lecture. But what I like most about native is that it gives us the ability to suggest related, relevant content to consumers. And do so in a way that breaks the norms of traditional advertisements. Native advertisements aren't just about promoting discounts or sales. Instead, native advertising is about generating content that consumers will find interesting or helpful. All the digital ads that we've looked at, up until this point have, been content in a sense that they were consumable. Native really tries to be a specific type of content. News or stories that consumers engage with that they would not engage with in the same way if it were advertising content. Good native tells a good story. So native advertising is a lot like news and story content. I'll use the term news-like because there's obviously some objectivity that's lost when you run a native ad. We can't just run a native ad and say whatever we want. It's not a banner ad. It's not a video. It's a piece of news-like content. Native is now implemented across a wide variety of websites, from small blogs to major news outlets all the way up to the The New York Times, native is an option. So what do I mean by story-like content? Think of it as a story that we want to tell as a brand, product, or service. It's not just a link to our site, it's a piece of news-like coverage that touches on something that is of interest or of impact to readers. If we are Whole Foods, for instance, it could be a recipe that we made and want to feature on other recipe websites. Perhaps, more commonly, native advertising can be thought of as an amplification tool. If we, as a brand, find a piece of content that talks about us positively or adopts a viewpoint that could help our positioning in an industry we can use native advertising to promote their article across the web in places where consumers might find the ability to read it. The article itself doesn't have to be ours. In fact, as we will talk about, it's even better when it isn't ours. We can do native at scale across thousands of websites using common platforms. It is really content that's telling a story. In the ideal situation, that story aligns topically to the types of stories that are commonly written on the website in which the ad appears. If our native ad were to appear on a travel website, for instance, CNN's travel blog, our sponsored story would be about traveling. For tech blogs such as Gizmodo, the sponsored content should be about technology. In my opinion, it's that relationship that determines whether a native ad is successful or not. The best question to ask yourself is would this content fit on this website were it to appear as an article? That's the key question to ask yourself with native advertising. So why does this work? Early academic work on native advertising suggests that given the story-like approach to advertising consumers tend to evaluate native stories as more authentic and engaging. In some way, by abandoning the traditional advertising formats, we're lowering the guard for consumers. Even though sponsored content is legally required in the US to have clear disclaimers, the factual structure of native content still seems to engage consumers. Native is a broad term. Native can be done in bespoke ways, and you can do this by simply reaching out to publishers in which you'd like to have your content run and working with them and their brand content studios to make that happen. It can also be done on many publishers at scale. That is, via a platform like Nativo who can insert stories on thousands of popular websites nationwide or even worldwide. This can be done by industry and this can also be done by consumer content type. We'll talk more about that later. We can reach out to thousands of tech blogs at once, for instance, or even just a handful of the blogs that we care most about. The way in which you approach native really depends on the needs that you have as a company. To be successful, native ads have to be relevant to the news content in which it's shown in context with. So if someone's reading a blog about travel, the article needs to be about travel. This match is key because the presumed advantage of native is that consumers are already reading about a topic that they're interested in. This interest will drive them to read your content. If they've already read one article, on a particular issue, why not read another. Native advertising seems to be really seen by consumers, at a greater rate than traditional advertising. This is likely due to the way that content is presented. As a story, not as a selling proposition. Will this change in the future? Who knows. My intuition says there is some novelty here in the fact that native ads are relatively new and consumers have not yet learned how to tune out this content. Slowly I suspect that native will become like other types of advertisements as it becomes more common
