Vibrant’s VP of global marketing Helen Mussard discusses how the industry’s view on native advertising has changed in 2014, and where it stands going into the New Year.

The last 12 months has seen a crystallisation of a new native mindset amongst the ad industry. Whilst this new mode of thinking has become more apparent of late, this change in mindset has been simmering for the last few years, driven by four main factors.

Firstly, although more money was going into digital advertising, publishers were under pressure to deliver more impact – not just views or clicks – for each dollar spent.

Secondly, the growth of mobile content consumption highlighted the acuteness of the ad viewability problem.

Thirdly, consumers’ ability to zone out ads to focus on valuable content has become so keen that crass “buy me / click me” ads are now largely ineffective. Finally, consumers’ lack of tolerance for interruptive ad formats means that such tactics are now brand damaging. The result is that most ad tech providers and publishers are now describing their ad services as “native” to tackle these issues – although many really aren’t.

Admittedly many premium publishers are still cautious about incorporating native ad strategies into their business. That’s only natural because by being a premium publisher they need to ensure that native advertising doesn’t disrupt their consumers’ content experience. However, more of the ad industry is working to the responsible native advertising principles defined by Vibrant Media in partnership with the Association of Online Publishers and leading publishers in May 2014, so publishers’ concerns are being eased. Native advertising campaigns require integrity, transparency, proportionality, relevancy and appropriate placement.

Who are the biggest players?

There are some industry players that have been running native ad strategies for longer than they were called “native”. For example, Dennis Publishing have been placing ads natively within content for some time.

The publishers that have adopted mobile-rendering sites have also been quick to adapt to native – and our research has seen a 23 per cent increase in big print publications adopting a new mobile site over the last year. However, these publications often turn to native after some months of trying in vain to run standard desktop-designed ad campaigns on their mobile sites. Publishers launching new mobile-ready sites will fare better if they think native first, rather than trying to leverage their old ad practices into their new mobile presence.

In terms of brands, Shell has been a true innovator in native advertising. This year the brand’s ‘Let’s Go’ campaign achieved incredible rates of consumer interaction and engagement using a range of native, responsively-designed ad units. From within contextually-relevant, brand-safe editorial, Shell’s native ads presented consumers with numerous video, text and image content, highlighting the company’s focus on broadening the world’s energy source mix and improving energy efficiency.

Where does native stand going into 2015?

If brands want to communicate with consumers via digital devices in 2015, then they have to choose truly native formats. Multi-Screen advertising is where we’ll be seeing brand stories unfold. They need to ask the following: Does this campaign launch from within content where consumers’ attention is focused? What are the levels of viewability of the ad units? Do the units work on both handheld and desktop devices? Will the units used to deploy the campaign deliver impact or just views or clicks? Do the ad units deliver a constructive ad experience to consumers? And most importantly, what type of content will the unit give consumers access to and is it relevant to what they are currently reading?

Effective labelling

Firstly there’s a retreat from good practice amongst certain companies who only recently introduced native advertising – particularly with regard to effective labelling and transparency. It’s important to be transparent with consumers. Overt labelling and clear signals should communicate to consumers that native ads are marketing messages. Media literacy is also important. Publishers and advertisers should provide consumers with accessible explanations about the native ads displayed within their publications. Such transparency and labelling is a core part of Vibrant Media’s native ads. By using our Intelligent Qualification system, called Vibrant IQ, brands and publishers not only tell consumers that there’s an ad within content, but also the specific brand that wishes to communicate with the consumer, before the consumer even chooses to launch an ad.

The second concern is with effective showcasing of branded content that native ads give access to. One of the main objectives of native advertising is to give consumers a fulfilling advertising experience. Good quality, relevant content should be immediately accessible to consumers after their interaction with a native ad unit. Some brands need help with selecting or creating the best quality content for their campaign. Ideally, brands need to invest time in planning their content offering. However consumers are interacting more with content that’s “culturally relevant” – timely with relevant events. To attain attention and retain engagement, brands need to choose native ad technologies that enable content to be changed in real time.

Changing relationships between clients, agencies and media owners

For most native ad campaigns, actually placing the ads is pretty labour intensive. For a campaign to fit the form and function of each publisher, there’s a lot of customisation involved. That means clients, agencies and media owners have to work more closely together. However, as editorial teams’ focus is on developing content that captivates consumers, they have a key role in native ad deployment. Good native advertising campaigns must be supported by editorial teams so they’re collaborating with ad sales, marketing, creative and tech teams on native ad campaigns.

However, constant customization, offline negotiation and lack of scale makes the majority of native ad campaigns cost and time prohibitive for many marketers. Clients, agencies and media owners are looking at programmatic solutions which take account of the needs and insight of editorial teams but which also automate processes and streamline ad operations. Vibrant Media has just taken its private native ad exchange out of beta. It is enabling programmatic deployment of Vibrant’s contextually and audience targeted native ad campaigns at massive scale and incredible speed. This will simplify the native ad process and the relationship between clients, agencies and media owners.

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