Native advertising is essentially the digital equivalent of the old-fashioned advertorial. It allows brands to blend their messages and products within a publisher’s own editorial content in a sponsored way that ensures readers still give it time and attention. But is it a scalable format for both advertisers and publishers?

Why true native advertising isn’t scalable

Readers are most engaged when they’re reading niche content based on their specific interests, be it horse riding, sailing or baking. Whilst advertising on these websites generates high levels of engagement, the cost of running bespoke, hand-made native campaigns soon adds up and becomes prohibitive.

The issue arises because a brand can only really run an individual native campaign once because the content is so aligned with a specific publisher that it would need to be redesigned and rewritten in order for it to be placed anywhere else. As a result, there is a real need to create ad campaigns which are as effective as native but making them far more automated and scalable.

Producing scalable adverts with high quality content

One popular method being used by advertisers is to deploy content from a selected partner publisher and use it within the context of a large scale banner format such as the IAB’s Rising Stars unit. This approach offers links to contextually relevant content alongside brand advertising but still within a standard display format.

When a visitor clicks through one of the links on the banner they are then taken to the partner publisher’s website where additional brand advertising is displayed around the target content. For advertisers this lets them scale their campaigns whilst still achieving similar levels of engagement to those found in native advertising.

Benefitting advertisers and publishers

It’s fair to say that this solution does lose some of the bespoke integration of true native. However it still provides those high levels of engagement whilst tackling the scalability problem. At Martini, we’ve seen engagement rates increase by as much as 33%* when content is integrated into an ad unit. Advertisers can now deliver high quality advertising content across hundreds of sites via a partner publisher’s content rather than creating their own each time they want to run a native advert.

Furthermore, this solution benefits the publisher as it saves them time in the long run too. The large scale banners allow them to generate enhanced value inventory from standardised ad units so that they can scale alongside brand campaigns.

Pure native advertising is certainly here to stay. For example it’s highly effective when dealing with a large, highly brand-relevant outlet or one that speaks directly to a high percentage of your target audience. However, when advertisers are looking to enhance response rates across a scalable campaign covering multiple sites then taking the best parts of native and combining it with traditional digital advertising can deliver more cost effective ROI.

*As measured by MOAT

 

By Matt Gower, European Managing Director at Martini.

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