Native Advertising Movement

Pinterest conducts these five-hour workshops for the dozen or so partners in its Promoted Pins program — i.e., its advertising clients, each of which committed between $1 million and $2 million for a six-month run. After a workshop, participants typically see the interaction rate on their pins increase by 25%. Making sure advertisers know what they’re doing before they start spending money ensures they’ll be happy with the result, says Bradford, who oversees sales. They’d best be happy, since charter advertisers are reportedly paying $30 to $40 per thousand impressions–several times the rate Facebook commands.

Like Facebook’s Sponsored Posts and Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, Promoted Pins are a form of so-called native advertising, in which an ad takes the same form as the user-generated content around it. Native advertising evolved in response to what marketers call “banner blindness,” the tendency of Web users to tune out adjacent ads. It’s also turned out to be perfect for mobile phone screens, where ads must appear in the main feed or not at all. More than 90% of Pinterest usage is on mobile, higher than Facebook (68%) and Twitter (86%), according to comScore.

Contently empowers journalists and brands to engage audiences with compelling content.

Maximize your impact on TheAtlantic.com through the following custom executions. Each is designed to help you build brand affinity and command the attention of our thought-leader audience. Visit "Custom Programs" section to learn about our beyond-the-banner capabilities.

OneSpot started out as a news aggregation company, but founder and CEO Matt Cohen, who has worked on technology for newspaper companies and also done time as a VC, said it’s now focused on a bigger opportunity. His basic argument is that editorial content, not advertising, has a much bigger impact on people’s opinions than ads. (It’s similar to the point made by other companies like InPowered.) Actually, he clarified that it’s a false distinction; for most people, it’s not about “commercial versus non-commercial content,” but rather “annoying content compared to content that is interesting.”

So why not promote the interesting content, like blog posts on a company’s own site (assuming they have good posts that aren’t just marketing their products), or a positive review elsewhere? Especially since much of that content just disappears once it has scrolled off the front page.

OneSpot customers can pipe all of their content into the system, then it’s repackaged into standard banner ads, which are distributed across a larger network. (You can see what a TechCrunch ad looks like below.) All of the content from a brand’s feed automatically makes it in, and companies can manually add content from other sites.

Fusing big data, machine learning algorithms, online ad networks, and the principles of native advertising founder Matt Cohen and co-founder Ian Clarke created the OneSpot platform.

OneSpot’s passion is to use bleeding edge technology and sound advertising principles to radically increase the effectiveness of your content, both company generated and earned. OneSpot doesn’t stop at putting your content in front of a number of eyeballs, it’s technology monitors viewer behavior to retarget consumers with even more compelling content to drive them through the content to conversion funnel.

It's never been easier to create, distribute, retarget, and measure your content ads.

inPowered enables brands to influence purchase decisions by amplifying what experts say about them

InPowered is launching what it calls its Earned Advertising Platform. The ads themselves are the same type of thing that the company has been promoting all year, but now, instead of having to work with InPowered to create the ads, brands can create and launch campaigns without any help.

Peyman argued that this “creates a new way of influencing people.” When a company releases a new product, positive reviews are going to be much more influential than any banner advertising. Yet those reviews usually only “sit on the front page for a couple of hours” and don’t reach the fullest possible audience.

With InPowered, brands are basically paying for advertising, but it doesn’t look like advertising — instead, it’s a collection of article links. Pirouz compared the ads to Facebook Sponsored Stories, except that instead of promoting positive comments from a user’s friends, they’re promoting expert recommendations. In other words, it’s paid advertising that promotes earned media, hence the “earned advertising” name.

I love Fred Wilson's perspective on Native Monetization, as well as Jon Steinberg's take on it from a few months back.

What is Native Monetization? The way I see it, it's the idea that publishers should be empowered to build, sell, and scale advertising experiences that are organic and authentic to their site's user experience, rather than just slapping boxes on pages and running interruptive prerolls.

At Sharethrough, we're proud to be the first technology platform built exclusively for brand content (not traditional ads) and native monetization (not interruption).

Over the past ten years, publishers have continued to monetize their sites with banners and pre-roll ads, and advertisers have continued to pump billions into these formats, in spite of tanking performance and near- universal disdain. While click-through rates on display ads started out at around 9% in 2000, they now hover around 0.2% – which means 99.8% of banner ads are completely ignored. Meanwhile, led by YouTube and Hulu, the pre-roll ad market is only shifting in one direction: towards “skippable prerolls,” not forced interruption. And preroll skip rates are only moving in one direction (hint: when you give users the ability to skip annoying ads, they usually do).

As banner clickthrough rates go down and preroll skip rates go up, a new opportunity has emerged for web publishers: native advertising. Native advertising is defined as ad strategies that allow brands to promote their content into the endemic experience of a site in a non-interruptive, integrated way.

Most, if not all, major platforms on the web — Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, and WordPress — have universally adopted “native” advertising formats, in some cases entirely eschewing traditional display banners and interruptive preroll. For these new native ad platforms, borne of a generation of banner blindness and skip buttons, native is the only viable ad strategy. These native ad strategies are built around twin pillars of content and choice, not banners and interruption.

Native advertising is increasingly entering into the conversations of today's digital marketers. It is defined as an advertising unit designed to integrate seamlessly with a user's consumption experience. It is taking shape in the form of Sponsored Stories on Facebook, promoted content on Buzzfeed, and Paid Discovery on StumbleUpon, to name a few. Marketers are scrambling to better understand how to take advantage of this "new" form of advertising, yet they neglect to relate these platforms to their predecessors.

Native advertising isn't new. It has been around for more than a century, though it has evolved into more personal applications as time has passed. In today's digital world, we are hungry for brand interactions that are meaningful and turn into viral distribution. This is no different than the pioneers who built native advertising.

Editor’s note: Dan Greenberg is the founder & CEO of Sharethrough, the native video advertising company. Dan has been honored as an AdAge “Media Maven” and was recently named to the Forbes “30 under 30″ list. You can find him on Twitter at @dgreenberg.

Five months ago, I published an article on TechCrunch that provided the first framework for the emerging Native Advertising market. At the time, “native advertising” (a term coined by Fred Wilson) was a new name for an old concept — monetization models that emerge from the underlying user experience of the site or app, integrated into the visual design and driven by content-based ads.

Native monetization is what underpins Google search advertising, and native monetization is what’s at the heart of why billions of dollars of ad revenue have shifted to closed platforms like Facebook (Sponsored Stories), Twitter (Promoted Tweets), and YouTube (TrueView Promoted Videos) over the past few years.

Remember how media websites looked in 1999? In fact, most still look the same: a scrollable homepage with above-the-fold features and below-the-fold article links; a prominent, central navigation intended to drive more page views; and banner ads up top and on the sides.

But the traditional content publisher layout is now being replaced by content streams, grids, and galleries that produce a more social, fluid experience… and take advantage of the fast-growing market for native advertising. Native ads are brand content such as videos, photos, and articles directly integrated into the fabric of a publisher’s site, such as Facebook Sponsored Stories, Twitter’s Promoted Tweets or promoted videos on YouTube and Tumblr. Forward-looking publishers are turning their sites into fluid content streams to create a more dynamic user experience for their content and to incorporate branded content
into the mix.

Here are three design frameworks that are growing in popularity and expanding the market for native advertising.

Mashable is set to unveil a beta launch redesign on Wednesday (Nov. 14) aimed at putting the social media-centric publication at the center of both the data-driven publishing and native advertising movements.

On the ad front, the site will adopt an infinite scrolling mechanism, designed to only serve "below the fold" ad units when a reader actually scrolls down the page. That will help Mashable make the argument to advertisers that it only serves viewable impressions—a standard many in the online ad world hope becomes commonplace, as the industry strives to adopt a common ad currency.

In addtion, Mashable has rolled out what it's calling a"storytelling ads unit." This ad treatment allows brands to buy multiple units on one page, which in conjunction lay out a single narrative as a reader scrolls down the page.