Summary
Forecasts show that native is expected to be 74% of total digital ad spending by 2021. With the advent of a more cross-channel, cross-device world, it’s only fitting that advertising has become more amorphous.
Using both survey and eye-tracking methods, Yahoo! partnered with Nielsen to determine creative best practices for this critical new advertising format. Their work produced these best practices for native ads:
- Leverage people-based images in your native ads, especially on mobile.
- Don’t shy away from letting your logo shine in your native advertising, and the larger the logo, the better.
- Brand mentions do not have the same impact as logos, but are still important to include in the headline of your native ad.
- When it comes to labels, it’s better safe than sorry. Include clear labels of transparency, but it’s clear that as native units become more pervasive, consumers are becoming more permissive.
- No need to create too many ad lengths: :15 second native video ads are the preferred ad length for native video units.
- To drive traffic to your site, use :10 second native video ads, as there is a bias towards action for shorter ads.
- Don’t be afraid to leverage auto-start ads when it comes to native, as it drives a slight increase in brand affinity and outperforms user-initiated ads in recall and fixation.
- Produce professional video ads; they outperform amateur videos across all generations and devices.
- Encourage users to activate Closed Captioning in order to achieve maximum recall of your ads’ messaging.
- Ensure that you have a seamless mobile experience in place for the consumer post-click, because users tend to fixate on the “more” button.
