Native Advertising

Ask five different brands to define native advertising and you will get five different explanations that vary from calling it sponsored content to editorial brand integration and everything in between. Although often surrounded by ambiguity, one thing native advertising is not is traditional. Standard definitions aside, native advertising continues to be a growth category with larger chunks of dollars being thrown at it year over year. As brand seek ways to combine value added content weaved with their agenda to attract their target audience the philosophical debate over it’s effectiveness continues. Audience reception often depends on combination of transparency, quality and relevance of content.

As the category develops the landscape of pricing, solutions and packages offered by publishers will be an innovative wild west. New formats and clever ways to integrate a brand’s value outside of the tired digital ad products will continue to emerge and brands will test drive their way into best practices.

The explosion in content marketing has forced brands to rebuild their teams to produce more content than ever before. Native advertising gives them a method to bridge content marketing and advertising efforts into a powerful campaign tool. Native advertising combines the power of brand and product marketing with editorial. When it works it really works and when it gets it wrong it gets it really wrong. What will the next few years bring in this category? Will native become the new editorial standard as publishers look for new revenue streams? Will consumers balk at the perceived impurity of editorial in a brand wrapper?

The native advertising track explores trends, opinion, success and failure stories projections for the future. If you are wanting to understand how to dip your toe into native or go all in, then check the box on this track.