What Is Native Advertising and Why It's The Future

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Native advertising has a silly name but in practice is more than another marketing buzzword. It's a relevant way to advertise online in the 21st century. What is it exactly? Informational ads that mesh with the original content on a website.

For example: Buzzfeed. Their sponsored top ten lists are paid for by their partners, and fit seamlessly into a user's experience on the site. This strategy is becoming more and more prevalent around the internet as blogging becomes more and more respectable and necessary, advertising goes digital, and publishers need to monetize. In this article we'll discuss these reasons and more as to why native advertising is the way of the future.

Native advertising is an improvement on the advertorial, an advertisement usually at the end of a magazine that features a product alongside a column of copy. Advertorials have a headline in small print at the top of the page that reads 'Advertisement', alerting readers that this is in fact distinct and separate from the rest of the magazine. Otherwise it can be hard to tell because the copy reads like an article, often in the tone of the magazine's content. In reality, an advertorial is paid for by a brand, and is a less expensive way to advertise, than say, taking a full page in a magazine like Cosmo or Time.

Native advertising is an internet advertorial that can take the form of article, video, blog, photo, or other media. It can fall into two general categories: open source and closed source. The former defines ads that network across the internet; for example, a top 10 slideshow about the best cities to live in around the world, paid for by an investment firm, can feature on a number of different web sites. A closed source form would be a promoted Tweet which only appears on Twitter.

Many publishers are happy about native advertising because it allows them to monetize their sites, especially on mobile. Large publishers such as The Washington Post have even begun their own native advertising platforms. The key to excellent native advertising requires synchronicity between ad, publisher, and the rest of the publisher's content. Native advertising is easy to pull off on closed platforms like Facebook or Twitter. But on a site like The Atlantic or The New Yorker, it becomes harder to build a trustworthy ad that meshes well with the rest of the publisher's onsite content.

Meanwhile, the other option, online advertising-- from pop-up ads to banner displays-- hardly get any clicks. When these ads work, they lead to a high bounce rate, which no content publisher wants. If they don't, the user becomes frustrated from having to click through them, and in turn, loses trust in the brand and the site. It's no wonder clicks for banner ads are down to .2 percent of internet users in 2012 from 9 percent twelve years earlier.

In the future, the line between advertisement, editorial, and news will blur even further. Already, blogs such as The Huffington Post and Forbes continue to merge news and editorial, and some independent bloggers are already being paid large sums to review items. More and more, big news sites will have native advertising that fits seamlessly with the rest of their content, and which alerts users in small print that it is sponsored content. Ads that seem automated or irrelevant will go the way of the modem. The reason for this is native advertising is selective and cultivated; it takes human judgment to create quality advertising which is exactly what native advertising is-- a more seamless, integrated version of three internet marketing trends that exist today. That's why it's important to implement native advertising for your company, because it is geared toward easy user experience, high quality content, and networked professionals. Compared to the fragmented state of journalism, online advertising and publishing, it's easy to see how native advertising will soon be the standard for online ads.

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