The Advantages and Disadvantages of Native Advertising

You see them everywhere, every day, all the time. We’re talking about ads. On the streets. On billboards. On newspapers. Facebook. Your favorite news website. The games you play on your phone. Everywhere. It’s no secret that our world is overly saturated by advertisements, many of which are aggressive, dishonest, and downright annoying. That’s people are getting more elusive toward ads every day. It has gone well beyond just ignoring ads. A big chunk of ads people see daily come from the Internet. It’s been a while since people adopted measures like adblockers to actively prevent the ads from interrupting their online experience. You can see how this could become problematic for businesses trying to find customers all around the world.

To counter this animosity toward ads, marketers have developed unobtrusive ways of advertising to avoid disturbing the viewer. This has led to multiple forms of ads and promotional content that succeed in grabbing people’s attention without annoying them. Basically, the whole idea revolves around advertising to an audience without them realizing that they’re seeing an ad. One of the most effective solutions is native advertising, which has been proven to work well in providing value to consumers and generating interest while driving business goals and promoting a brand.

Native advertising is a paid promotion method that focuses on minimizing the aforementioned adverse effect of ads. To reach this goal, native ads mimic the look and feel of their surrounding organic content. The objective here is to have little impact on the user’s experience. Native ads are designed to match the visual language, function, and tone of the place they’re being served on. As a result, people tend to be kinder to them and don’t dismiss them just as easily as they ignore traditional ads.

Native advertising has been very successful in preventing ad fatigue, and the method is already very popular in the marketing world. The classic example of a native ad is an advertorial, which is an advertisement in print media that appears as an editorial article. Native ads usually try to bring value by addressing a common problem of the target audience and providing the advertiser’s product or service as a solution.

While this type of advertising feels a bit deceitful, it’s actually not that duplicitous because government authorities like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) oblige businesses to tell viewers that they’re seeing ads. That’s why there’s always a small phrase or tag on the native ads’ widgets that indicates they’re Sponsored Content or Paid Promotions. Publications and advertising channels charge brands for running native ads based on cost-per-click or cost per 1000 impressions.

Related: Native Advertising Vs Branded Content

Native ads have many formats since they basically imitate the shapes of the other content on their third-party publication platforms. This means they could be photos, videos, infographics, podcasts, articles, and blog posts. A very good example is Google’s paid search channel. The paid results you see on the search engine result pages look exactly like other normal links, except they have a tiny Ads indicator below them. However, the diversity of native ad formats could lead to confusion, since they can overlap with other ad types.

Alongside decreasing the effects of ad fatigue, native ads have other benefits that could make it a viable choice for you to include them in your paid promotion strategy.

Native ads fit right in the target platform. They’re not disruptive to viewers’ online experience, and they’re mostly safe from being blocked by ad blocker software. Native ads get much more impression than traditional digital ads and this makes them a great option for building brand awareness.

Brands and advertisers aren’t the only ones suffering from ad fatigue. With native ads, third-party publishers also benefit from non-disruptive ads because their user base engages much more with them. This results in higher ad revenue and demand for serving ads.

According to research done by Collective Bias, millennials respond way better to native ads compared to traditional ads. This research revealed that one-third of Millennial participants have purchased something as a result of a sponsored native ad. TikTok Ads is a terrific example of how native advertising can blend into a social platform and grab people’s attention without alienating or annoying them.

It’s not all pluses though. Native advertising has its own disadvantages and limits.

One of the biggest downsides of native advertising is the challenge of measuring the performance of native campaigns. Selecting the right performance metrics and monitoring tools requires a lot of research into your target platform, audience and a clear, well-defined set of business goals you want to achieve. The huge number of tools and networks available could make matters worse and more confusing.

As mentioned earlier, native could be a bit deceptive. Even though publishers are obligated to indicate the nature of native ads with disclaimers, audiences still may feel they’re being taken advantage of after finding out they’re seeing an ad.

This native advertising disadvantage could be mitigated through adding to the value of ads for the audience. Native ads are already treated better by most people than other ad formats thanks to their unobtrusive approach, but that might not be enough. Advertisers should always give priority to their audience when creating native ads and benefit from the low-profile nature of this format. With native, you have more a few seconds more of viewers’ attention before they find out it’s an ad. An informative or entertaining content will significantly increase the chances of positive reactions.

Native is a unique and complex advertising format. It’s not just about writing or producing an ad that doesn’t look like an ad. It also has to not feel like an ad. You’re not tricking your audience here, You’re just trying to have minimal impact on their experience and the flow of content. Native ads must not sound pushy and salesy, and they should provide viewers with actual helpful content. All this could make it much more time-consuming to produce native ads.

Learn more about Native ad spy