Native Advertising: The Next Big Trend to Watch For in 2018?

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Blog Authors:

Manu Malhotra - Associate Manager, Advertising Cloud

Vidya Ranjit - Associate Account Manager, Advertising Cloud

Digital ad spending is growing globally. Advertisers are tapping innovative ways to share their brand story with customers on digital platforms. From social to display, video to search, the quest to get customers attention share in a multichannel, multiscreen and highly distractive world is growing day by day. In a dynamic environment where customers are engaging across multiple touch points, keeping advertisements contextually relevant, timely and personalized is getting difficult. Add to it, the scale, we already have more than 1.8 billion digital buyers across the world!

  

A survey on the Internet users’ attitude pattern tells the story, advertisers are clearly struggling to keep ads non-intrusive. With ad inventories growing exponentially in recent years, customers are being targeted with advertisements beyond just screens. Variety of ad formats from text to display, dynamic interactive ads to video and audio ads, have been shouting for customers attention, engagement and action. Poor customer experience leads to customers believing that ads are becoming more intrusive. According to emarketer, 71% of the respondents feel ads are becoming more intrusive.

 

Every challenge is an opportunity. And that’s exactly what we are witnessing in advertising, right now.

The Trend: Rise of Native Display Ads

More than 50% of US display ad spend is on account of native ads, according to emarketer. By 2019 it is going to get bigger, 61% of display ad-spend will be on account of native ads, amounting to $41Billion!! That brings us to a few questions

What has been the reason behind the rise of native display ads?

Why are advertisers spending billions of dollars in native display advertising?

One of the biggest factors for the rise of native display ads is – they seem non-intrusive because they match the form and basic feel of content as they appear. Close to 75% of native display ad spending is on social platforms because that’s where they really gel well with the from and feel of the social content.

Forms of Native display ads

Most popular forms of native display ads are sponsored and promoted content that we access. Other growing examples are in-feed units that are available on social media channels such as twitter and Facebook. It also includes out-stream video ads. These out-stream video ads are typically served in a non-video setting such as textual content that we read on web or social media pages that we render day-in and day out. Instream video ads such as pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll are not considered as a part of native display ad spending.

 

A closer look at ad-units share world-wide reveals, recommendation widgets leads the pack with 38% share followed by in-feed native ad units. These two ad units work the best, according to emarketer report.

 

Adobe’s Advertising Cloud offers a range of ad campaigns across multiple screens in a single platform. It is a leading global advertising tool that fulfils your display, mobile, video, audio as well as social and television advertising initiatives. In-feed Native Ad units too can be created using Advertising Cloud. Most Native ads aim to position the brand image in minds of the customers and drive them to a call of action.

As native ads strategically camouflage itself within the message to look & feel like a part of the conversation. It blends in seamlessly with publisher’s content and is bound to increase the awareness, reach, clicks and views attached to the ad. Advertisers have further gimmicks to enhance the ad value with the use of a customized thumbnail, a pop-out expansion option and many more.

Currently, Advertising Cloud supports native click-to-play (video format), native auto-play (video format) & native display ads (banner ads). Native ads can be best used as a part of the engagement drive. Hence it is a win-win-win for everybody involved, be it the customer, who reads through the editorial content and is served the ad, making him believe in the creditworthiness of the content, for the publisher and the advertiser as they assure of higher click-through-rate & engagement rates.