Simone Krouwer, speaker at the 2019 Native Advertising DAYS shares thoughts on the state of native and gives a sneak peek into what to expect of her session
The future of native advertising on news websites will depend on how advertisers and publishers continue to implement it.
I expect a bright future if all publishers clearly label their native ads and if advertisers always aim to provide content that is highly valuable to readers.
Over the past several years, native advertising practices have already become more professionalized at many news outlets. This is due in part to more research, dedicated content studios, and clear disclosure guidelines. That being said, there are also still many poorly-written, poorly-disclosed native advertisements on the web. Research shows that negative experiences with advertisements and deceptive advertising practices can damage readers’ perceptions of native ads in general.
To prevent negative predispositions toward native ads on the part of readers – and to maintain reader readiness, as it pertains to a willingness to click on native advertisements – we need to keep improving the quality of all native advertising. I believe that if advertisers and news media try to implement native ads in an ethical and valuable manner, readers will be open to native ads.
Again, if I’m solely focusing on native ads on news platforms, I expect that more and more content studios will further develop into full-service agencies that help advertisers create various types of native ads for different types of platforms, not just the websites of the news publishers. I also expect that besides content creation services, other services such as providing audience insights and custom research, and broader content strategy services, will continue to grow (if advertisers are open to it).
It is surprising to me that campaign evaluation reports are often still mainly focused on reach/clicks. I think that using quantitative reach/clicks as the most important metrics often leads to more clickbait native advertising campaigns.
I am happy to see that more recently, the metrics have finally started to change into ‘quality views’ (i.e. people who are spending at leads 15 seconds on the page) and focus more on ‘quality reach’ (i.e. using the data to see whether the right audience has been reached). In my opinion, quality over quantity is key to native advertising success.
I think that there are two key requirements for developing great native for news platforms.
I hope that the industry will conduct research more often, in order to develop the best native advertising practices. Native advertising is quickly developing and there are many types of news platforms and new native advertising formats. I believe that if all news website and advertisers test readers’ recognition and evaluations of native ads, to make sure readers are not being deceived and to tailor the native ads to readers’ preferences, it will drastically improve the likelihood that native ads are being welcomed by newsreaders.
Finding the right balance between advertisers’, newsreaders’ and news websites’ interests. And did I already mention research? ;-)
As a researcher, I’m absolutely curious about insights from research from practice. I also can’t wait to hear success cases from the industry. This might bring up news ideas for future academic studies on factors that can contribute to effective and sustainable implementation of native advertising on news websites.
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