Is Native Advertising the Next Big Thing in Online Advertising?

Advertising is forever changing with the times. From banners and billboards to television and radio, most of the world’s advertising spend is now directed towards the digital space. Here, advertisers are also battling to steal an advantage over their competitors, which is driving innovation and evolution in the world of online advertising.

One of the resultant developments has been the honing of native advertising, which is increasingly seen as one of the most effective forms of advertising on the web. Put simply, native adverts are innovative digital ads that can include native video advertising and blend into popular websites and apps – they seem to be native to the website on which they’re published. Non-native adverts, by contrast, don’t seem to belong where they’re presented. That means they’re instantly recognizable as adverts rather than content a web user might want to consume.Here’s why native advertising is likely to become the next big thing in online advertising, given its significant advantages over the non-native adverts that many of us have become accustomed to on the web.

Native Advertising: Key Features

It’s important to briefly outline how adverts work on the web. You’ll certainly be familiar with them: they appear as banners, pop-ups, videos, or inset panels on websites, social media platforms, and applications.

Non-native adverts are often banners that load next to or above the content a web user has accessed. They haven’t been designed with the publishing website in mind, so they usually look out of place, or non-native.

Native adverts are instead tailored to the visual and textual style of the websites on which they’re published, and as such, they look at home there. Native adverts typically feature on websites with high traffic, seeing as it’s not worth designing a new advert for many different smaller websites.

How Do They Look? 

Native adverts are already common on some web platforms. Take Facebook’s news feed: here, as you scroll, you’ll thumb by personal content, news content, and innovative digital ads – all formatted in the same way.

It’s the same on search engines like Google. Sponsored results are labeled, but they are presented in largely the same way as results shown by Google’s search algorithm.

Plus, anyone who’s shopped on e-commerce platforms such as Amazon will know that sponsored or promoted content is presented in exactly the same way as other results – with just a subtle label showing which results are adverts.

These are all examples of native advertising in action. They’re significantly more sophisticated and less jarring than the non-native adverts plastered across the world’s websites.

Advantages of Native Advertising 

Now you’re aware of the differences between native and non-native adverts, it’s time to explain why native advertising is regarded as preferable – and something that’s only set to become more popular in the coming months and years. Native adverts are considered to be superior to non-native ones for the following reasons:

• Because they blend into a website, native adverts are seen as more likely to be read or consumed by web users, while non-native adverts are largely ignored.
• Native adverts use the same style as large publishing websites, which lends these adverts trustworthiness that non-native adverts do not possess.
• Native adverts are used on a small number of high-traffic websites, which means you can target your adverts at specific groups of web users who access these websites.
• Large websites are able to share their internal traffic data with native advertisers, which enables further targeting.

As well as these advantages, there’s also a significant disadvantage to the status quo of non-native advertising. Advertising is set to change in the coming months as data privacy laws shift the landscape for targeting. With third-party cookies being phased out, it’s going to become more difficult to target a non-native advert at a group of web users.

As such, there will be one main method of targeted advertising that remains, which is to make use of a large website’s audience demographics. If young people tend to visit a popular blog or news site, for instance, a native advert can be drawn up to target that large audience.

The Future of Native Adverts 

So with all these distinct advantages over non-native adverts, it’s clear that native advertising is set to go from strength to strength in the online advertising space.

While they’re already common on social media websites, which are among the most sophisticated marketing platforms in the world, we can expect to see other publishing sites cashing in on their large audiences and offering native advertising to advertising agencies and their clients.

If you’re considering getting involved in this up-and-coming advertising phenomenon yourself, do get in touch with one of our representatives from our mobile advertising company. We’ll be able to explain the benefits of native advertising for your firm and the costs associated with launching your own campaign.