Is it Sponsored or Editorial?

With the growth of television, internet and other paid advertisements, consumers from Utah and all over the country have grown accustomed to ignoring advertisements as they appear in front of them. Television commercials are fast-forwarded through and online advertisements are cancelled out. Content marketing has caught up to this idea of blocking out the ad and has now tricked readers into seeing their advertisements without even realizing it.

Articles that are paid for or written by a brand and are placed on a publishers site, or native advertising, has come forward as one of the more powerful ways in recent years to get your content marketing to the consumer in Utah or other parts of the country without them realizing that it is a paid advertisement.

In a study by “Contently,” 509 participants were asked to read native advertisements located on publishers’ sites. What they found was that almost every single advertisement they read was believed to be an article.

The participants also had a difficult time identifying what brand the content was marketing for depending on which publication the advertisement was on. Brands that were better at hiding the fact that it was an advertisement were trusted more than the other brands whose content marketing was a little more obvious.

Unfortunately, 48 percent of the participants felt deceived when they found out that the content was in fact an advertisement. Whether you are in Utah or somewhere else in the country, a consumer wants to feel like they are being told the truth and when they find out that the advertisement was paid for, it is more difficult to feel that the information was genuine.

On the other hand, however the study showed that if the native ad is done correctly, content marketing done through paid advertisements can actually life brand approval, but for the most part most participants were not in favor of the native ad.

The way to tell if an article is sponsored or editorial is by looking at the bottom of the page. Often the article will state something about the company sponsoring the post but the opinions belong to the author.

With the evolution of technology, people from Utah and abroad are growing accustomed to ignoring paid advertisements because they typically interrupt the content they were planning on viewing. Now, with native ads, companies are still able to input sponsored content without obviously selling the product. By creating content that consumers actually want to read, companies can now get the word out about their product without interrupting the consumers viewing experience.

Leah Ferguson writes for Fusion 360, an SEO and content marketing agency. They write for many other clients as well. Follow on Twitter