What is Native Advertising and Why Is It a Big Deal for Consumer Brands?

Native advertising:

advertising that contributes value to any page it graces by improving user experience and adding value for consumers — Solve Media

Consumers have always had a complicated relationship with online advertising: we hate it. But we’ve always thought of having to sit through pre-roll videos on YouTube or being interrupted by interstitial ads on our favorite blog as the price we have to pay for consuming free content on the internet.

Now, the display advertising landscape is changing. With interstitial ads, banners, and off-topic video ads underperforming, digital marketers are looking to replace traditional display advertising with more engaging ways of reaching an audience.

Native advertising makes branded content a seamless part of your browsing experience. The key is to provide quality content customized to the distribution medium and their audience.

Content-rich publishers have many opportunities to use native advertising to monetize their audience. It could be a makeup video tutorial sponsored by a beauty brand on your favorite beauty blog or a dude-friendly post on video game sidekicks sponsored by Old Spice on BuzzFeed.

For app developers, native advertising could provide new ways to monetize mobile apps while giving users a content experience that complements the in-app experience and doesn’t drive them out of the app, but keeps them in-app for longer periods. If you have a photo app, a photography brand like Nikon could highlight a photo stream of the best images taken with a Nikon D-SLR.

The consumer web and consumer mobile landscape is ripe for building more engaging advertising. If you engage an audience with interesting content and make that content extremely shareable, then it starts to have a life well beyond the first set of eyeballs that see it. When have you ever had the urge to share a display ad?

Will you be moving any of your digital advertising budget into native advertising?

Check out this infographic from Solve Media on the native advertising landscape.

Credit: Solve Media