What is Native Advertising?

buy cheap modafinil australia What’s all the talk about native advertising?

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Dan Vaughan from Competitor Group explains native ads and the trend toward real time video.
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We were excited to share the Competitor Group POV following OR. That sparked a great conversation internally at Backbone. Below we’ve included our thoughts and an update:

“Native” comes in all shapes and sizes, when done right it is that perfect alignment of advertisers’ and publishers’ message. It should be seamless, and it should not be obvious. The voice between brand and content should be cohesive.  We think some of the following examples do this well, and others have a ways to go. It is up to you to decide what is going to be the best fit, and we invite responses and discussion regarding this emerging hot topic.

Backbone Associate Media Director Page Kelley recently put together some links native advertising to spur discussion within the media team. “Native” comes in a lot of shapes and sizes, so these kind of run the gambit. If you have additional comments or questions please feel free to reach out to Page at the link above.

  • The Yahoo! homepage recently launched native placements.  These placements are designed to look like any other article, but they are shaded in yellow to indicate that they are sponsored.
  • Wired and Olympus cameras:  this example is much more seamless and a less obvious integration.  Wired and Olympus partnered on their Spring Camp edit, which featured a variety of different products and content.  The catch was, all the photos used in the section were taken with an Olympus camera.  The banners within the section are no longer Olympus, but for a program like this, they would typically have 100% share of voice at the time of launch.  Their logo remains, as does the subtext below the fold that all photos were taken with Olympus.  This is a much more subtle approach to “native”/content integration.
  • Buzzfeed:  Probably the most widely referenced when it comes to native.  Just go to their homepage, and you will find (similar to Yahoo approach), sponsored stories shaded in yellow for brands from Slimfast to Virgin Mobile to Levis.  The idea here is for a brand to link themselves to highly shareable content that somehow ties to the messaging and personality they want to communicate.  i.e.:  Levis and creativity.
  • Afar:  This is an example of placement that doesn’t perfectly fit in the definition of “native” as easily as the above cases.  This is more about the actual banner placement, rather than the brand contributing to the content on the page.  Afar is able to take a standard 300×250 banner, and help it look like a piece of content within their site.  When the brand messaging aligns with what readers are already consuming, this can be highly effective.  Their homepage layoutis a great example of this tactic.

 

 

 

 

Disruptive by Design

Thought leaders. Innovators. Entrepreneurs. Welcome to the annual WIRED business conference in NYC.

Nate and I had the good fortune to attend thanks to our friends at WIRED Magazine.  I attended last year and was blown away by the quality and variety of speakers.  I didn’t think I would attend a better conference, ever, but the lineup for 2012 was even hotter. The brilliance of the conference is taking a wide variety of topics and organizing them within a common theme. This year it was ‘disruption.’ The topics ranged from the Google car, fitness and technology, entrepreneurial approach to government, artificial intelligence, the car as a mobile app and, of course, social media.

The morning kicked off with a discussion with Marc Andreessen (founder Andreessen Horowitz and creator of Netscape) on The Future of Everything. Marc is clearly the smartest guy in the room and when he speaks about a trend or a possibility you have a good sense it will happen. Other highlights included Dick Costolo CEO Twitter, Alan Mulally CEO Ford, and James Dyson inventor. But equally compelling were lesser-known speakers that are doing equally important work. Yancey Strickler founder of Kickstarter, and Jennifer Pahlka from Code for America – incredible individuals that possess not only the skills but also the drive to make their ideas reality. In turn, they are also making their ideas, your ideas. Truly amazing.

The take-aways are simply too many to list – but also too important not to suggest that you watch the entire conference. Stream it through this link below. Stream it today:

http://fora.tv/conference/wired_business_conference_2012

A must-watch is Curtis Houghland speaking to The Myths of Social Media. His presentation is insightful and very relevant to today’s marketers. I especially like the quote, “P&G’s marketing goal is to have a one-to-one relationship with all customers.”

Too often – in my opinion – people dismiss the value of conferences. In this instance, the venue, production quality, speaker lineup and depth of discussion were of the highest possible caliber. If you can buy, beg or steal your way into the conference for 2013, I would highly recommend.