All, Social Media & Content Marketing

The Dark Future of Native Advertising

Eric Wittlake is a digital and B2B marketer with a background in analytics and online media. Based in Portland, Oregon, he runs the media group at Babcock & Jenkins. To read his original post on email list guides, click here. 

Native advertising, and specifically native publishing programs, will struggle in the future.

It isn’t because publishers’ offerings are flawed, because visitors have developed sponsored content blindness or because we have all developed an aversion to all sponsored content.

It comes down to a marketplace issue that, over time, will be a thorn in the side of native publishing. It will lead to a degradation of media brands, an influx of low quality content and ultimately the loss of many of the benefits that made native publishing attractive in the first place.

First a quick definition of native publishing. Then we will look at the research that points to an upcoming challenge to the growing native publishing market.

Native Publishing Definition: Paying to publish your content within the property of an established media company which traditionally maintains editorial control over published content. Native published content functions like the publication’s own editorial content.

Native publishing is a subset of in-feed native advertising, as defined by the IAB.

THE ALLURE OF NATIVE PUBLISHING

A study published by IPG Media Labs (and underwritten by Forbes, whose BrandVoice is one of the early Native Publishing programs relevant to B2B marketers) highlights the potential of branded content:Branded content meaningfully outperformed display advertising on every metric assessed, including lifts in awareness, brand favorability and purchase intent.

Branded content is delivering the results advertisers are looking for, and native publishing is one of the easiest ways to start creating branded content and ensure it is actually seen by your audience. Native publishing is the clear solution. Or is it?

THE REALITY OF MARKETING CONTENT

According to recent research from Chartbeat, native published content (or what they call native ad content) is suffering from low quality. On a typical article two-thirds of people are engaged for more than 15 seconds, on native ad content that plummets to about one-third. In addition, people don’t scroll to get into the content. Only 24% of people scroll on native content pages, roughly two-thirds less than the 71% of people who scroll on traditional content pages!

Making that statistic even worse, as Doug Kessler recently pointed out, this content often isn’t clearly labeled. Many visitors aren’t bouncing because of a sponsored content, advertorial or marketing disclaimer. They are bouncing because the content is that bad before they even get to scrolling. Ouch.

My own research last fall showed marketing content on Forbes was getting significantly less distribution than editorial content as well.

AN UGLY OUTCOME FOR NATIVE PUBLISHING

When you combine marketing content people simply aren’t interested in with the increased interest in native publishing, from both advertisers and publishers, publisher brands will suffer. As they lose credibility, the value of native publishing falls. As the value falls, marketers that continue will need to turn to cheaper content sources to make the programs pay off. It is a downward spiral.

But content marketers committed to producing valuable and differentiated content have an alternative.

BUILD YOUR OWN CONTENT BRAND

Everyone offering native publishing programs today has built a valuable content brand. You can too. Marketers before you have proven that you don’t have to be a media company to create a content brand that drives results. Here are just a few examples:

  • Since launching in 2010, Content Marketing Institute has a built a professional services business by establishing its own content brand.
  • Hubspot gets more than 1 million visitors a month to their site and nearly 750,000 leads a year. Largely driven by content, Hubspot is delivering numbers many marketers can’t match with much larger advertising budgets.
  • Indium Corporation has made their engineers the core of their content effort and are providing useful (i.e. valuable) information in a space many might see as boring.
  • EMC’s RSA Security Conference is one of the largest security conferences and draws an audience well beyond EMC’s client and partner base.

Today, the price of attention is talking about what your audience cares about. Fortunately for you, it is a price most other marketers aren’t yet willing to pay. There is still room, in nearly every market, for companies willing to pay that price to develop their own audience and content brand.

Companies that create their own content brand and develop their own audience can break their reliance on media companies that are lowering their content standards and eroding their brands.