Native advertising isn’t new. It’s been a communication tool that dates back at least a century. In this part of my interview with Roger Wu, we focus on the three points every brand should understand about this tactic. Here’s what Wu says:
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Determine what your brand hopes to achieve with native advertising.
Native advertising comes in many different flavors and formats. If your goal is to generate sales and calculate ROI on your digital advertising investment, native advertising is not for you. If generating the maximum number of impressions is your goal, other digital advertising platforms allow you to optimize your budget to maximize your impressions, typically to the detriment of your targeting: the whom and where the ad appears. Native advertisements integrate your brand’s story intimately with the publisher. It is difficult to place a dollar amount on the value and awareness created when an influential publisher talks about your brand.
Native advertising relies on powerful storytelling to attract the reader and be remembered.
Cooperatize relies on storytelling to help brands get noticed by its potential audience, however, your brand needs to be willing to get into the reasons behind why your brand exists and touch the reader on an intrinsic and emotional level. Brands need to be able to trust the publishers to tell their story accurately and effectively to their audience.
The story is not always about your brand.
Traditional marketing stresses the “4 P’s” of bringing your product to market: product, place, price, and promotion. This framework implies your advertising should talk about your brand and the products and services you have to offer. However, in order to build a strong emotional story with native advertising, brands need to trust that the publisher knows how to tell the story that will resonate with the target audience; sometimes the story is not necessarily about the brand. This counter intuitive concept is best illustrated through a Dell sponsored New York Times native ad unit. The “advertising” Dell published in the New York Times centered on the issues Millennials face in the workplace. This story has little to do with Dell’s core business of computer technology, but rather associates Dell with an important cultural trend that allows Millenials to see Dell from a different perspective.
