Content trickery will only alienate your audience

Brands, agencies and publishers need to take a consumer-friendly approach to digital native advertising that emphasises transparency and value to the reader if they want it to strengthen, rather than damage, their brands.

Ads thinly disguised as editorial alienate and annoy customers rather than engaging them and persuading them to take the action the brand desires.

Many publishers like digital native advertising because it’s one way to mark up the cost of their inventory. Some agencies like it because it allows them to count editorial hits as advertising hits.

Brands also like it because they think it’s a perfect way to break through advertising clutter and grab the audience’s attention. Yet the most important party in digital advertising – the consumer – is increasingly mistrustful of native ads. Marketers and advertisers need to rethink how they handle native advertising if they want to drive benefit from this potentially powerful tool.

Digital consumers have little patience with content trickery where brand messages try to pass themselves off as something they’re not – independent, objective and unpaid-for.

Today’s digital-savvy consumers do not want advertising pushed down their throats. They see it as cheap and dishonest when a brand cheats them into clicking on its content under false pretences. The result is high bounce rates as consumers steer away from the web page in disgust when they find a blatant hard sell rather than the content they were expecting.

However, that does not mean that native advertising is without value.

People want brand messages to be packaged in a way that is relevant and transparent and that gives them the choice to engage.

When these conditions are met, they are often happy to interact with the content.

For example, many business and entertainment news users are receptive to native advertising if they feel it is from a trustworthy brand and if they believe it to be relevant to the content they were looking for in the first place. The more relevant the content to the reader, the better its credibility.

And when native advertising is properly labelled in a manner that differentiates it from editorial, users are more likely to see it as trustworthy, especially if it is placed on a site with high credibility.

International research from Edelman Berland found a 33% lift in perceived credibility of native ads when they appeared on credibly perceived news sites.

And of course, one good way to ensure that native content is well received is to ensure that it has value for the reader. This means start with the reader’s needs rather than taking a hard-sell approach.

We should all be using analytics tools to track user engagement with our content. As an ideal, we should be aiming for at least 90 seconds of engagement – anything less should be counted as a bounce.

In addition, the right analytics tools will help track what users do after exposure to the native ad, which gives insight into how well it is working.

Native advertising will have an important role in the digital media landscape in the future, but brands must learn how to use it wisely.