What Do You Guys Think Of Native Advertising?

I've noticed a few posts that seem similar to native advertising, but I was wondering what your opinions on native advertising are and if you have found ways to incorporate them, likely in an extremely targeted way, to your marketing plan?

Avoiding questions on its morality, do you feel that native advertising can help small businesses? Do you think that it isn't as effective when small businesses attempt compared to major corporations, or does it work because the small business is likely working at a smaller scale? Do you still consider it native advertising if its on a more localized scale?

 

You're going to have to inform me as to what exactly "native advertising" is. It's possible I am familiar with it, but perhaps call it something else. But that term is definitely not something I am familiar with at this point .I'm open to any technique possible to increase revenues and traffic, so please do inform me if you don't mind, joanjette.

 

Honestly, you're probably not going to find much that is positive on the term, but I felt that more people knew the term. Check out John Oliver's Last Week Tonight on the topic if you get the chance. Its basically advertising that people don't realize is advertising. One of his better examples was sponsored news. Its generally a bad thing, but since most people here are operating on a smaller scale I thought there may be some more positive uses, specifically in marketing products, such as etsy where the owner may have a pintrest or instagram. Instagram is currently a huge mess of native advertising, where people who buy followers or just pay instagram get their images to more people. The big corporate versions are things like puppies and coke or an attractive woman sitting with a bag of wendys. A lot of people on this forum seem to be for purchasing followers, which would get them recommended to more people by the apps and websites, which would be native advertising.

 

I think it's alright. Companies need to make money and if this is what it takes then so it shall be done.ni don't think it's that dirty of a tactic anyway unless the business is something that requires complete neutrality and objectivity such as the news groups, as you've mentioned, but even they are businesses themselves who need to profit so I'd say at the very least it's just inescapable.

 

Companies have been doing stuff like this for years - for example, look at TV shows with live audiences. A certain percent of the audience are actually paid actors who are coached to scream and cheer on cue to give a false sense of hype over the talk show host or whomever. And of course, I'm sure you're familiar with the standard laugh track used on sitcoms.

Native advertising has been on talk radio since the birth of radio - how many times have you heard a DJ casually start praising a product on air? Or magazines and news outlets that just repeat press releases about upcoming movies, not objective or critical reviews of them? They all make money off of doing this.

I can see where this is a thorn in Google's side though, since they are always trying to produce the best quality search results, and don't want to promote falsely hyped products, sites or services - but I don't really see how they can effectively fight something like this. All they are essentially doing now is nabbing services offering this once they become too popular and their name gets out there too much. It's the same with how they are busting private blog networks, they hang around the black hat forums and wait for the chatter to go up on a particular service to purchase links on that network.

I don't believe they can effectively block stuff like this automatically algorithmically, without artificially demoting too many innocent sites in the process, which would cause more harm than good.

 

I don't have a problem with native advertising....for the most part. I really don't like advertisements that look like news articles in print (magazines) or online. I'm okay with online sponsored advertising as long as it's labelled as such. I recognize that nothing is free and these types of placements pay the bills.

 

So much advertising is subliminal and marketeers have been doing this for years. All we can really do is be aware that the media is generally not as it seems and try not to get sucked in. Advertising is just a fact of life these days.

Of couse, native advertising can be incredibly useful, particularly in social media. Recent studies show that native ads are viewed for the same amount of time as editorial content and are much more likely to be shared than a banner ad. Here's an interesting article on the topic:

http://www.theguardian.com/media-ne...r-zone/native-advertising-quality-scalability

 

People get sold to so much today that they have become blind to the ads. I think when content has been shared by many it maybe more seen as having more value, I see no problems with this type of advertisement.