By Adam Wakefield
In
part 1, we touched on native advertising’s positives. Abdinor then, however, moved onto the negatives, beginning with credibility.
“The best native content is usually that produced by the editorial staff because they know the tone of the publication, they know the audience,” he said. While agencies or the brands themselves might have quality content writers themselves, a publisher’s editorial staff would be able to do that content far better than most.
One of the pillars of the 20th century publishing model was that publishers did not carry commercial content into the publication unless it was advertorial. The picture today was markedly different.
“We’ve all seen what’s happened to newspapers and some broadcasters. I would argue the rules have changed,” Abdinor explained.
However, publishers have to be true to their audience because it is easy to lose an audience if the content does not resonate with them.
From a commercial point of view, selling native on a cost per thousand (CPM) model only tells half the story. As more native advertising come onto the market, CPMs will gradually turn down.
There are also questions surrounding a click-through rate approach, assessing brand awareness versus performance and native advertising does not scale. There are also hard costs involved such as editorial remuneration, unique resources being used, and native being bespoke in nature.
“A native piece has got to look like it’s written in ‘journalese’ and journalese doesn’t say ‘Go buy this’,” Abdinor explained.
A positive about native is when you have an environment where editors and writers are creating the content, the hard costs can be factored into the price of the native advertising.
“For a publisher, it’s a strength. Take hard costs and you turn them into something you can sell,” he said.
An ideal scenario is when the agency and brand have two or three meetings with the editor, who is accompanied by a senior writer or two and they talk about what the brand wants to communicate and transmit. Editorial goes away, considers, and comes back with an idea.
They might revert once or twice after that, then the piece is written. It then goes into the news cycle onto the front page above the fold and stays there for two days. Following that, it gets pushed onto the different social channels more than once.
Measuring the impact of native could be done through click through rate in combination with engagement. Performance could be measured through how viral the piece was and the social lift it generated.
“If there’s a good way to measure how viral your content goes, and the social lift, you can build that into how you sell the native, then it becomes less of a bespoke thing, then you are delivering,” Abdinor said.
There were four types of native advertising, which Abdinor said were broad categories.
The first was discovery; widgets provided by a third party integrated into a website but which did not expressly replicate the native environment. This came in the form of links such as those next to those of the publisher’s usual editorial content.
They involve little input from the publisher and are bought and inserted programmatically. They are measured by click-through rate, often highlighted with the vendor’s logo, the destination, along with other visual cues such as “From around the web”.
The second is in-stream, which is true native content. It looks like an article, it’s been written by editorial staff, is found in a publisher environment and styled in-house.
The other two forms of native advertising are platform, found on social media among user generated content, and custom native advertising.
As he approached the end of his talk, Abdinor said that putting up stats around native advertising was a futile exercise in the most part, but the “throwaway statistic” worth noting is between $4 and $7-billion which is expected to be spent on native advertising in the United States in 2017.