If someone stopped you on the street and offered to give you $100 if you explained what "native advertising" was, you might be at a loss... until you realize you've seen it for over a decade.
The reasons you might not be able to explain it, is because native advertising's goal, in its most subversive, is to blend into its surroundings well enough that you might not realize it's advertising.
In Wayne's World, they did a great spoof on product placement, which, in essence, is native advertising. You can see a 1-minute video of that scene in Wayne's World here.
But there are hundreds of native ads you see every time you watch television:
- Jack Bauer in 24 driving a Chrysler and using Dell computers,
- The American Idol judges slinging their huge red Coke cups,
- Windows phones in Scandal, and
- Apple computers in almost every hipster show.
You think Tom Hanks being a FedEx driver in Cast Away was a coincidence? No way. They paid for that privilege.
Remember Morgan Spurlock's movie "POM Wonderful presents the Greatest Movie Ever Made"? That flick unabashedly claimed it was the first (maybe only, who knows?) movie entirely paid for by product placements.
The movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was, arguably, one of the best product placement (and use of native advertising) in recent history, when E.T. followed the trail of Hershey's Reese's Pieces. When the movie took off, so did the sales of Reese's Pieces. Some think that's when the product placement industry was born, which is now estimated at over $1 billion a year for motion pictures, and almost $2 billion for television.
There's even a blog about how product placement is generating as much revenue as the actual ads during the commercial breaks are.
Ads on Google results pages are native advertising
Really, any ad that blends into its environment so well you expect to see them, is considered native advertising. The ads on Google are unobtrusive, and in the same style as the organic (non-paid) results, so they adopt to their natural environment.
Advertorials (you remember those: multi-page ads "disguised" as a magazine's content) were at first done so well, the magazines had to put the words "Advertising" across the top of every page of the advertorial. Those were early forms of native advertising, though granted, those missed the point of being unobtrusive. And the first known use of the word "Advertorial," according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, was 1946.
Take NASCAR, or almost any other sport that has corporate sponsors. A car with its sponsors logos plastered all over it can be considered native advertising. Those logos have become so ingrained as part of the "sport," it would almost seem weird without them.
The "newest form of marketing" has been around since the 1900s
Now that you know all the areas native advertising covers, you know you've been living with it for as long as you can remember. You can read "A Brief History of Native Advertising" here. Yes, advertorials have been around in magazines and newspapers since the early 1900s.
The original form of native advertising happened in 1900 in the Aquidneck Park horse track around Newport, Rhode Island. That car race was sponsored by William K. Vanderbilt Jr. where the winner of each race was given the "William K.Vanderbilt Jr. Cup."
Native advertising as it is known today, is 4-5 years old.
It's a type of online advertising intended, by design, to be less intrusive by taking on the design of the website it’s on. By mimicking the design of its host page, the theory is, by being less intrusive, there's a better chance of the user or visitor relating to the ads' content, and in turn, clicking on it. For the most part, native advertising is designed to blend in with the websites' regular content.
For those who say this might be trying to trick the visitor by thinking they're clicking on content of the website, and not an ad, well, if someone can't distinguish between the two -- especially after they click the link and see it's not an article -- well, it's our humble opinion we have more important things to worry about in life.
- Infographics
- Sponsored Content
- Branded Content
- Display Ads
- Product Placement
- Links that recommend similar articles
- Promoted Listings like you see on Amazon and other buying sites
- Paid Search (Google AdWords or other search engine sites) and
- Social Media Promotions/Recommendations
If you want to pursue native advertising through digital marketing, and are looking for the type of web design Columbus Ohio has to offer, lets talk. We're a Columbus web design firm with a working knowledge of internet marketing.
