According to recent research conducted by the ANA, growing numbers of advertisers are increasing their investments in native advertising. This trend is one of several ways that advertisers are using in their attempts to increase advertising effectiveness in a world in which it’s getting ever easier for consumers to avoid ads.
The appeal of native advertising, often in the form of sponsored content in online publications, but also including product placements, is that consumers who tune out ads may be more open to messages that are woven into the content with which they’ve chosen to engage. That’s great, and it sometimes works.
Native advertising is also highly targetable – a benefit when budgets are under scrutiny. Even better, once you’ve gotten the consumer’s attention, it just might be more effective in building your brand than traditional advertising. Arguably, credibility and persuasion should be boosted if you have a good fit between the brand and media vehicle, supported by the implied endorsement by the publication, website or program where the message appears.
But native advertising has some very real downsides, which will become increasingly apparent to advertisers who continue to move greater proportions of their ad budgets into this space. The first problem with native advertising is that its reach is extremely limited, with any one initiative generally lacking in scalability. Unless you can figure out how to (affordably) go native in the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards, your native advertising is unlikely to get exposure opportunities, let alone true engagement, among more than single digit percentages of your target audience.
Which brings us to the second problem – the expense of creating the content. While native ad creative isn’t inherently expensive to produce, it is by definition, highly customized – meaning that you won’t be able to use your produced materials over and over, as you can with traditional ads. Both the actual cost and the time that your team will need to invest in development will result in significant inefficiencies for native advertising.
Finally, due to the constraints of needing to fit in with the media venue, you will sacrifice some of your ability to present your brand in a fashion consistent with its advertising campaign. Because your brand and its associated equities will have less prominence, the fact that the message is about your brand may be lost on the consumer who engages with the content.
For all the reasons that advertisers like native advertising, it surely has a role to play in a well-rounded, integrated communications campaign. But for its lack of scalability, high cost and potential blurred focus on the brand, that place should rightly remain relatively modest within the overall advertising budget for the typical brand.
