Four Native Ad Challenges and Tips for Dealing With Them

It can be easy to fall into a pattern of thinking that all your native advertising challenges are unique to you and your particular circumstances—given the breadth and diversity of the field. Every situation is unique, and requires unique and creative ideas to solve. Right?

Yes, to a certain extent. One of the factors that make native advertising challenging, but also extremely effective when done right, is that it's not plug-and-play.

That being said, it is possible to pinpoint some of the most common challenges, and provide some best case practices for addressing them head-on. In fact, is what we have done in the following article. We've identified four common challenges, and listed out some key tips in overcoming them. So read on – hopefully, something here can help you too.

1. Establishing Trust

Trust is central to many aspects of native advertising: trust between client and studio; publisher and audience; brand and consumer. Why does it matter? Well, brands who lie will die – eventually. Therefore honesty and transparency can be your strongest allies. Yet it can be a big challenge to establish trust across the entire scope of a project.

Poor communication is another roadblock to building trust: excellent communication is key to developing a trustworthy collaboration within and between organizations. And creative studios or agencies shouldn't merely be seen as hired help, but rather as valid and equal partners that can be trusted to create content with the clients' best interests in mind.

2. Creating Content with Soul

Creating content that resonates and invokes trust from a reader, while simultaneously being leaden down by a need to produce a result, is a native advertising challenge that overcomes many marketers. Much of this derives from companies not understanding their own "soul," and therefore failing at projecting that outward.

In addition, many companies can be too short-sighted rather than taking a long-term approach to what and how they communicate. Delivering soulful content - and developing relationships that help it emerge - takes a significant investment in time and money over time.

Similarly, there is often a general fear of bucking the status quo. Whether it's about protecting current power, or wanting to stay in a known comfort zone, there is often not enough risk-taking to help imbue content with the "soul" we'd all like.

3. Scale and Reach

The difficulty of scaling up distribution to maximize reach and impact is a common native advertising challenge and a frequent topic of conversation. How do we make sure our great content gets seen by the right audience? And can 'true native' for one publisher's channel work on other channels?

But maintaining high quality as you scale can be tricky, and changing social algorithms make it hard to determine budgets needed to attain the desired reach. Even agreeing on KPIs that include both quality and reach isn't always obvious, nor is knowing at launch whether content quality or distribution strategy will have a more significant impact on overall performance.

4. Measuring success

Was your native campaign a success? Says who? While everyone agrees on the importance of measurement, few seem capable of settling on exactly what metrics to track and how to interpret the numbers. Capturing quality data and consistently acting on it is a lot harder than it seems. 

At present, there are plenty of metrics service providers, but many are too complex or expensive to be implemented by smaller or niche operations. It's also hard to get publishers, brands, and analytics providers to share (comparable) data.

We also don't have accepted industry benchmarks for measuring the performance of native advertising campaigns. Studio, agencies and brands are forced to develop methods of their own.

Photos by: Jukan Tateisi, Bernard Hermant , Nathan Shipps