Native Ads are Headline News for Advertisers

These are all short, straight-forward headlines, that supply the reader with the most pertinent fact at the moment of impression. With native advertising, this age-old newspaper principle of using straightforward, fact-based headlines still applies, and in a world where our attention span is falling it has become even more important than ever before. People now consume stories by scrolling a feed rather than clicking a link, so the headline has become a crucial tool for brands in capturing the attention of everyone who sees their native ad in-feed, not just those who click.

 

The opposite approach to this is clickbait, optimising a headline at raw curiosity. Clickbait simply isn’t effective in the feed so if you’re a brand using those tactics, you’re wasting the opportunity to reach the 99% of people who will pass right by. It is essential then, for brands to optimise their native creative towards communicating their marketing objectives in a clear, human fashion.

 

Like a newspaper editor, a marketer must find their content’s ‘hook’ and use that to engage the reader with every headline imparting this idea at the moment of impression. We interact with in-feed native ads differently to traditional display so every (viewable) impression is actually an opportunity to create brand impact. Our research has shown that we actually read native ad headlines, even if we don’t choose to click on them, whilst banner ads are processed more like images - enabling us to peripherally identify them and filter them out.

 

What is making things tougher for brands is that we live in a world where the average attention span has tumbled since the adoption of the smartphone.

 

Research published by Microsoft in 2015 claims the human attention span has declined from 12 seconds in 2000 to around nine seconds today. The result is that many people only read the headlines. In this context, brands must convey their message succinctly, powerfully and quickly.

 

Take millennials for example. Our research shows that one in five of them only read headlines. However, we know that headlines on their own can drive brand results. 44% of millennials said that they visited a brand website or social media site after reading only a headline which gripped their interest.

 

When it comes to video, headlines can be a huge draw in getting audiences to engage. Our research discovered that 80% of millennials said the headline was the main influencer in getting them to watch a native video and 79% read the headline while watching a native video.

 

Ultimately, it is the combination of the headline with the strong visual element of the video which has the greatest impact for brands. Facebook says the vast majority of ad recall, awareness and purchase intent take place within the first seven seconds of watching a native video and Twitter recently found that in-feed native video stimulated 14% more memory encoding than when watched full screen.

 

With many traditional online advertising formats, such as pop-ups and pre-roll ads, not delivering the audience engagement and ROI advertisers crave, native ads have a crucial role to play.

 

We’ve seen engagement rates for native ads between 20% and 60% higher than for banner ads, while there is a clear link between a well-executed native ad campaign and search engine activity. These results confirm how important it is to grab the reader’s attention with a sparkling headline, that both conveys meaning at the moment of impression and encourages the audience to click through to a full content experience.