Laurence Blanchard, strategy and innovation director at Vizeum Global, talks about the discussion on the future of native advertising and content marketing at DMexco 2015.

The discussion focussed on how brands need to earn consumer trust and permission to deliver greater native experiences and engage users enough so that they want to pull content from brands.

Starting with a historical view of native advertising, member of the senior leadership team at the Mozilla Project Darren Herman highlighted that ‘native’ was not created on digital media. However the difference is in the fact that with previous generations and non-digital touch-points, whether it’s BB King singing about brands across the radio waves in the ’40s or TV-based product placements in the ’70s, it was never clear these were promotions.

In the modern landscape we now have a clear definition of what good native advertising consists of – it needs to fits into the natural user interface, and be fully transparent that it’s promotional content.

The secondary topic of content then highlighted its long-term aim to deeply engage and answer more long-term objectives. In an attention economy where consumers face an unlimited choice of things to take up their time, energy and money, we must start to think of the user-based ‘vendor relationship management’.

Rather than a brand determining who and how to communicate via customer relationship management, the paradigm has been shifted to one in which a user is in control of which brand they are open to receiving communication from. Furthermore, it changes how we see push and pull marketing – push marketing is native, while pull is content marketing.

This reference to Doc Searle’s ‘intention economy’ and the implications it has on how we view advertising, nicely laddered up to the recent Mozilla update whereby relevant content from the Internet is ‘brought to you’ through its native browser Tiles product.