Quick Bites - Part 5 – Native Advertising

Author’s Note: Quick Bites is a series of write-ups on various marketing concepts. I decided to come up with this series to help people understand these concepts better through a few easy to read posts. Any comments or suggestions for the next topic are welcome. Cheers!

Native advertising refers to a form of disguised advertising. In this, the sponsored content matches the form and content of the platform. It is called native because of its similarity to the platform it appears on. The product and content are merged together. Also, there has to be a clear disclosure, whenever using this type of advertising. The problem with these type of advertisements is that mostly all sites become commercial sites and it gets difficult to differentiate the content from commercial offerings. Three categories of Native Advertisements are: 1. In Feed/Social
Rolled out on all the social platforms. The promoted posts and the sponsored content comes under this category.
Examples: Google advertisements, above the organic search. Looks like the normal search results. Sponsored videos on Facebook. YouTube keyword search. 2. Recommended Content
On blog posts or websites, the recommended section comes under this category. 'From the web' headers are used by the advertisers to drive the relevant traffic to their pages. 3. Paid Inclusion
These are those posts and articles that are the most expensive and most effective. The whole advertisement appears to be a part of the content except for a small disclosure of ‘sponsored content’   _________________ About the Author: Priyanka is a second-year MBA student at Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow and is a member of InsideIIM’s second student team. She is also a part of PRiSM, The Marketing Cell at IIM Lucknow.