Native advertising (Natural ads)

Natural adverts often pretend to be personal advice. Product placement in a video and photo content, links, keywords for a product, comments on the platforms about the advantages of the product are absolutely typical forms of native advertising.

Obviously, this type of advertising even doesn’t look like advertising. Its main feature is a content-like format when auditory perceives non-disruptive information, which doesn’t interfere with the rest of the content and even complements it.

Natural adverts show up all around the internet. Users even don’t realize how often they interact with this sort of advertising. Here is a list of the most common circumstances under which users deal with natural ads:

1. The news feed in social networks. Often ads appear together with a video and photo content, sponsored comment or a commercial link.
2. In search results in Google. They can be promoted or appear as regular results that are placed on the top of the web search query.
3. Recommendations. This type of natural ad appears under articles, reports or news users read or look through in blogs. These adverts are directly related to what the user has just read about.
4. Product placement. For instance, video bloggers often use this approach in their videos on Youtube. Influencers show off a product of a certain company combining the main content with advertising in an extremely natural manner.

Users can recognize native advertising by the following features:

• active commercial links;
• video and photo content with noticeable brand product in the shot;
• content, which has inscriptions below or above such as sponsored and even recommendations as these ads are also paid, so they can’t be considered as truly personal advice or one’s own choice.

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) and the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) regulate the correct use of these ads to ensure that the users are not misled.

Their main goal is to achieve an honest and open use of advertising and allow customers to make their own choice.

Perhaps, the biggest thing about native advertising is that it is not that annoying compared with other forms of advertising.

What is more, these publications have a better impact on customers’ behavior.

Based on statistics, readers notice natural ads 53% more than regular publications or traditional ads. It means that native advertising really works in some situations.

Native advertising vs digital display advertising

Display ads are all forms of publications, which are paid and focused on visual audience perception.

These posts are promoted openly so everyone can easily understand that this is advertisement stuff.

Both natural and display ads have their own advantages and disadvantages:

1. Natural ads help to sell the items faster and easier, are more clickable, have a high quality of the traffic, and effective for all devices;
2. Display ads are much cheaper, more effective for PC (desktop), perfect for retargeting campaigns, and promoted openly as paid ads.

Native advertising placement

Native advertising placement or product placement is a form of natural ads when branded items or products are involved in the content that is shown to a large audience.

In this case, advertisers don’t boost the product directly. Instead of this they just mention the branded item casually or as personal advice.

Such form of advertising is often used in social networks by influencers.

Also it is extremely regular for movies, TV-shows, Youtube videos and so on.

Companies pay big money for native advertising to generate sustainable positive feelings in the hearts of their potential customers and as a result get appropriate profit.

Pros and cons

Like any other form of advertising, the natural ad has particular advantages and disadvantages which you should carefully consider as an advertiser before making a final decision.

Here is a shortlist of benefits and pluses of native advertising:

1. The ad does not interfere with content viewing. Often it even complements the publication and attracts users’ attention while showing the product in a better and more representative manner;
2. The natural ad is more clickable, so more users will visit the required web page or site;
3. Native advertising bases on the users’ preferences so it will be shown only to people who are already interested in it;
4. In the long-term run this approach increases brand appeal and recognition more reliably than other methods.

However, native advertising also has some critical disadvantages. Here is a list of them:

1. Such ad costs more than any other marketing service;
2. Many users complain that it looks like native advertising deceives buyers who believe that it’s personal advice or recommendation;
3. Too much advertising can reduce brand credibility and create negative attitudes.