Once a year the ad world gathers in Cannes, France, to congratulate itself. Judges at the Lions International Festival of Creativity hand out three Grand Prix awards, 21 Gold Lions, 38 Silver Lions and 70 Bronze Lions to recognize the 5,000 commercials entered into competition. Industry elders show up to offer their sage advice (this year, it was George Lois and Annie Leibovitz). The villas and yachts are packed, and 11,000 Mad Men do their Don Draper-best to party hard (the XBox Music event left no ear drum intact) and live up to the glitz of the more heralded Cannes Film Festival.
I went to Cannes Lions a few weeks ago to participate in a panel discussion with CMO's -- and to listen and learn. The talk along the Croisette can be summed up in a word: content. Not editorial content. Not the kind that makes up 30-second TV spots. But the stuff called native advertising -- marketing messages for an era of social media that both marketers and publishers hope will outperform the trillions of display ads (those banners and boxes) that no one clicks on.
FORBES is a recognized leader in the move to native ads. We first launched our BrandVoice program in November 2010. Back then it was called AdVoice, itself the result of this earlier version. Today, we have 20 marketers, always identified and labeled as such, publishing content on Forbes.com. They use the exact same tools I do to connect and engage with news enthusiasts. With a hot trend comes new players, lots of banter (both substance and spin), increasing confusion and new thinking. There's even a Web site with a native ad "leaderboard" that shows how publishers and brands are doing. And what kind of trend doesn't have its own summit?
That kind of hubbub calls for my own native ad update (with an assist from my colleague, Mark Howard, our SVP of Ad Products):
1) What exactly is a native ad? Everyone's got an answer. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a trade group, recently took a stab at collecting definitions. Here are a few: social ads, sponsored listings, social media promotions and advertising content ads (my favorite: in-game brand, whatever that means). Actually, these terms apply much more to native content (often called content marketing) -- the stories, posts, videos and photos produced by a brand, some through ad agencies, some not. A good way to look at the thing called a native ad is this: a paid-for placement on a digital screen or within a content stream that promotes a brand's content marketing much the same way editorial content is promoted. That positioning, consistent with a given site's consumer experience, makes the native ad a discovery mechanism for marketing content that lives on the publisher's site, not the marketer's. Contrast this to the display ad, which is disruptively placed and transports consumers away from the site they came to visit in the first place. On Forbes.com, the native ad is effectively a news headline, always clearly labeled as written by the marketer, that points to one of that marketer's posts on our site.
2) The search for standards and measurements: The $10 billion digital banner business lives and breathes on the performance-tracking of IAB-approved banners and rectangles. On average, these ads, a throwback to earlier digital times, produce a minuscule clickthrough of 0.05%, down from a more tolerable (believe it or not) 1% many years ago. The new push is about tracking placements of native ad units, not the marketer content those links actually point to. Native ad placements can be measured and compared across multiple sites, unlike the native content itself, which is typically measured in ways unique to a site. For example, a BrandVoice post is stacked up against the performance of editorial posts on Forbes.com and across the social Web. Soon, FORBES will introduce a new article page that enables tracking of BrandVoice headlines and additional native ad placements across our platform.
3) Placing value and measuring ROI: Value for any ad -- display or native -- is determined by looking at the reach to a target audience and how that audience engages with the brand’s message. Native marketers will be looking for improved results over the much-maligned boxes and banners. In the case of brand journalism practiced on Forbes.com, the marketer wants to reach our 26 million monthly visitors (as measured by comScore) and the influencers within its target audience. In a recent internal test, two measures of consumer reaction -- recall and favorability -- scored significantly higher for BrandVoice posts (especially those that also included the partner's display ad) than they did for traditional display ads.
4) The rise of the NANs: On Forbes.com, BrandVoice partners use our tools to publish content. Their headlines, effectively the native ads, and their posts, the native content, flow though our content management onto Forbes.com screens. The newest industry phenomenon is Native Ad Networks. They're developing publishing tools, content management systems and server infrastructures to dynamically deliver native ads across multiple Web sites. By publishing on a particular NAN, a marketer can distribute its native content to hundreds of Web sites. Similarly, Google is putting together a native CMS to hook up with its Dart for Publishers (DFP) servers. In many ways, this would mimic the way boxes and banners are currently placed across the Web. That means content that may be native to individual Web sites would instantly become far more generic and commoditized.
5) Native in a mobile world? This gets interesting. Consumers don't value mobile content any differently than what they read or watch on desktops and laptops. In fact, they may place greater value on it because of the small-screen intimacy. It’s marketers who can't come to grips with it all, largely because they're stuck trying make already ineffective rectangles even smaller. Native represents a way for publishers to solve for this value-to-ad spend issue. Since native ads and content are created to serve the same needs of the user as the editorial, value is being delivered to the user and therefore the marketer. As I often say to our BrandVoice partners, the mobile headline is a better display ad.
The rush to native is critical to the three vital voices of the media business -- journalists, the audience and marketers. Journalists, deeply suspicious of all forms of advertising, will instantly turn against native if it's not implemented properly. The Atlantic found that out the hard way. The audience can benefit from a marketer's insights, but it, too, will run the other way if native turns out to be little more than a hard sales pitch. Marketers, eager for scalable solutions, could quickly turn native into generic by solely taking short cuts and relying on the new native ad networks. To quote my colleague, Mark: "As publishers look to these new forms of monetizable ad units, those who haven’t built out a strong content strategy for what type of native content will appear will start to accept anyone’s content, breaking one of the main rules of native: it must add value for the user, it must add value to the marketer by building a deeper more meaningful relationship with the users."
