Last week, Tim Cain, managing director at The Association of Online Publishers, was interviewed by Carat about the state and potential of native advertising. The background to the interview was a study on native advertising that was conducted by The Association of Online Publishers earlier this spring.
During the interview with Carat, Tim Cain had plenty of interesting observations about native advertising, emphasising the importance of quality and transparency, if native content is to engage with its audience.
However, there was one quote from Tim Cain that stood out, because it echoes one of the major concerns with the profitability of native advertising: Scalability.
“One of the challenges with native advertising is in its very purest sense it’s something being created in a distinct way for one media brand,” he says.“One of the things that some brands are looking for is to use that messaging on a wider scale. My view on that personally is that it then stops being native advertising and it becomes branded content. For me when people talk about native scalability, I’m not sure it is scalable.”
It’s an interesting take, because most of the debate surrounding native advertising and scalability seems to focus on “how to scale native?” instead of “should native scale?” or “can native scale?”. The notion that native advertising needs scalability and scalability should get crammed down the throat of native advertising regardless of cost, is contradicted by Tim Cain. He suggests that scalability defeats the very purpose of native advertising, which is content ‘created in a distinct way for one media brand’.
To an extent, it’s a matter of definition and perspective. Tim Cain subscribes to the belief that native advertising at its core is a piece of content that is implemented with one specific media in mind. It is the classical understanding of native advertising: A continuation of the publisher’s standard editorial content. Naturally, the same piece of native advertising can’t pose as a continuation for two different publishers. In this sense, and many others of cause, native advertising is completely different than display advertising. You can’t just plaster the entire interweb with the same piece of native content, cross your fingers, and hope for the best. Well, you can, but it won’t end well. Says Tim Cain:
Instead, he says, the most effective form of native advertising is within a close partnership with a specific media brand.
“If you want it to be seen to be integral to the brand, what they’re gaining by that is they’re gaining the trust and the loyalty of the media brand that’s got that relationship,” he says. “That would diminish if it’s not in the right style. In my mind, pure native is a one to one creation.”
Despite heavy investments and hours upon hours of engineering, publishers and agencies haven’t been able to circumvent the fact that consumers resent display ads and are reluctant to engage with them. It’s the very reason why the concept of native advertising emerged: New means of advertising were needed. Now, with the same publishers and agencies yearning for ways to scale, it seems that native advertising is running the same risk that wore down its predecessor: Irrelevance and inability to engage with consumers. If native advertising is expected to scale, it will inevitably reject consumers by exposing them to content that doesn’t really fit in with what they were looking for and additionally disrupt their reading experience.
Some of the most succesful and popular examples of native advertising, are clearly made for one specific publisher. ‘Women Inmates’ and ‘TV Got Better‘ by Netflix at The New York Times and Wired respectively. Forget about native advertising. These are pieces of content that fit very well with the editorial standard of their publishers. There is a feeling that these articles were written with a specific audience in mind. You copypaste those two articles and publish them on twenty different websites and suddenly the vast majority of the audience will experience a dispute between their own expectations and the content presented to them.
That’s not good for the reputation of native advertising and it’s a dangerous path for publishers and agencies alike.
The post Native advertising doesn’t scale – and maybe it shouldn’t! appeared first on Native Advertising Institute.