Editor’s Note: The following are from a session during the ARF NATIVExSCIENCE Conference
In today’s “attention economy”, advertisers are looking for every advantage to monetize eyeballs. While advertorials, sponsorships, and product placement are not new to the industry, they have become more popular as consumer ad avoidance increases.
This presentation discusses the latest insights on advertisers’ attitudes towards native advertising, branded content, and integrated marketing.
Key findings from Advertiser Perceptions’ 2018 Native, Branded Content & Integrated Marketing Study:
- Lexicon continues to evolve in the market: This study defines: branded content as the content developed by the brand for distribution – includes content created by an influencer who shares it with their network or the brand’s owned networks; native advertising as paid ads that are very cohesive with page content, assimilated into the design, and consistent with the platform behavior so as to appeal seamless to the viewer/user; integrated marketing as the strategic marketing approach of inserting a brand or brand messaging into content.
- Native is very much mainstream in the digital space: 66% of advertisers surveyed are including native regularly and consider it a key digital strategy. Forty percent of these native dollars are spent programmatically.
- Top reasons why advertisers use digital native/branded content: Effectiveness at building brand awareness, influencing consumers’ perceptions of the brand, and enhancing the user’s experience and adding value.
- Top capabilities sought by digital advertisers in their native/branded content partners: Ability to target the ideal audience, providing good value for the money, and audience composition.
- Top capabilities sought by TV advertisers in their native/branded content partners: Ability to reach their target, providing content relevant to the brand, and audience composition.
- Biggest obstacles to using native/branded content: Cost (which can be high with larger efforts and unclear on how it is all spent), too timely to create/distribute, lack of creative support, and scale/inability to distribute off-site.
- 75% of advertisers find it very/somewhat important to retain ownership of publisher developed content.
Justin Fromm – VP, Business Intelligence, Advertiser Perceptions