Programmatic and Native Advertising: The blurred lines between ads and content
As we continue our journey to understanding all the great tools available to a digital marketer, we have come to Programmatic and Native Advertising! You are probably wondering how these things can be beneficial to your company? I will start off by sharing my understanding of native marketing, and how it can help you be a more effective digital marketer.
The Power of Native Advertising:
Native advertising to me at first sounded like it would be an ad that is "native" or close to where a person is from so that it is more relatable to them. I was kind of close, but not quite what native advertising really means. Sharethrough offered a great definition along with some graphics to help better explain what native advertising really is. They defined it as "a form of paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form and function of the user experience in which it is placed".
So native advertising is about really making ads feel more natural on a webpage as your browsing it, compared to intrusive and blocky advertisements.
As depicted above, the highlighted ads are the native advertisements that you would find when scrolling any website that has related content whatever you are searching for. This way of advertising is much more natural in the flow of the website and could help increase the likeliness of someone clicking on it.
Native advertising can be used on multiple platforms such as on websites, mobile devices, and in podcasts. Gimlet Media has a podcast called StartUp which talks about the life of a start up company and what its really like to start a business. In episode 9, the narrator talks about a time when they made a mistake in one of the native advertisements they used. In another podcast segment called ReplyAll, Gimlet had an advertisement for Squarespace that was well transitioned between segments. The narrator was talking to a 9 year old boy who started his own page about Minecraft on Squarespace and the boy's experience with the website. Everything about the ad was great, except for the fact that the boy being interviewed had no idea it was going to be used in an ad.
It turned out that the boy and his mother were under the impression that he was going to be in an article in This American Life, mainly since the name Alex Blumberg was mentioned in the email asking if they would be willing to do the interview. This misunderstanding led to a furious mother, and an almost written article by Buzzfeed covering the incident. This looked really bad for Gimlet since they were being portrayed as "sketchy", and "taking advantage of children", but this wasn't the case at all. It was a simple misunderstanding that was solved once the narrator on the podcast sat down and talked to the mother.
This just shows that as a company, you have to be careful of how you portray the information you are sending out to consumers. One person may think one thing is going to be a story, when in reality its just another advertisement. If done properly, native advertising can be a useful tool when thinking of ways to do online advertising. But if overdone, native advertising may become too intrusive and can be seen as annoying to consumers. In this way it may be risky for a company to try native advertising, but if done right it can prove to be extremely profitable.
Breaking down the meaning of programmatic advertising:
Programmatic advertising helps automate the decision-making process of media buying by targeting specific audiences and demographics. Programmatic ads are placed using artificial intelligence (AI) and real-time bidding (RTB) for online display, social media advertising, mobile and video campaigns, and is expanding to traditional TV advertising marketplaces.
So in essence, programmatic ads basically is real-time bidding taking place for advertising space on webpages and automates where the ads are placed to best fit the website. The major upside to programmatic ads is that you can manage them through automated ad buying and selling tools that are helping drive digital ad sales. It is projected that by 2018 programmatic will account for 50% of digital ad sales! As a marketer, programmatic may be a more viable way of advertising if its popularity increase and if software comes out that is compatible with both small and large businesses. So if your company hasn't looked into programmatic, it is probably a good thing to implement into your marketing strategy.
Soon enough there should be companies coming out with software to make the programmatic advertising process even easier. ComScore is already working on making their own independent metrics that will be more transparent, and high quality so that companies may want to considering using programmatic advertising methods. Hopefully a balance can be established early on so that companies with huge budgets can't potentially overtake and saturate the programmatic advertising market.
