Native Ads Will Democratize Advertising
Display ads on publisher sites have been the digital advertising go-to for the past decade. They’ve helped brands do everything from raising awareness to increasing engagement to selling products.
Now, publishers are beginning to champion native advertisements. While display ads use animation and color to distract readers from a publisher’s content, native ads complement content by blending into the website’s design style guide (read more on native ads here).
Arguments in favour of native ads usually focus on benefits such as improved reader experience, increased audience affinity, and even higher click through rates.
But native ads also provide practical benefits to advertisers: democratizing ad design makes marketing jobs a lot easier.
How Teams Create Display Ads
It takes a village to make a display ad. As an example, take a look at this ad promoting living room furniture and imagine the production steps involved.
Step 1: A writer drafts headlines and copy. Length and format depend on whether the display ad is animated. In this case, only the button and logo come in after the descriptive text.
Step 2: The copy goes to a designer. They have the impossible task of creating an ad that captures attention and combats banner blindness, the tendency for users to anticipate and avoid display ads on a page. In this case, the coffee table, bright blue color, and triangle movement draw eyes from website content and towards the ad.
The designer might also have to mock up several sizes of the display ad. The IAB recognizes 15 standard sizes, with websites also offering custom display formats such as expandables.
Step 3: The ad goes into development since it needs animation. The ad is probably built in HTML5 (or Flash, if a publisher website is dated), and the developer might have to code it differently for various publisher sites and ad platforms. This step repeats for every required size.
Step 4: The marketing team gets the final advertisements and places them on the publisher sites and ad platforms.
Step 5 (Probably): An executive has a change of heart and decides the blue triangle should actually be a green circle. The design process restarts, and the marketing team gain a few more gray hairs.
Levelling the Field with Native Ads
Unlike display ads, native advertisements follow a streamlined structure so they can easily fit into a publisher’s web design. Marketers placing native advertisements usually provide the publisher with:
- A headline
- A description
- The landing page URL
- A photo or thumbnail
That’s it. Components can vary based on the publisher, but native ads rarely require advanced design as they have to blend into an existing website.
Let’s take Reddit as an example of a publisher leveraging native ads. The first entry is actually an advertisement for a financial portfolio manager. The ad design matches the rest of the feed but is labelled as a promoted post.
This native ad has three parts: a headline, a thumbnail, and a URL. It’s easy to imagine a single person providing all three pieces without the help of a designer or programmer. Reddit then takes these pieces and serves an in-feed ad to targeted communities.
Transitioning the burden of creative execution to publishers represents a huge shift in digital advertising. Native campaigns don’t only save advertisers time and money by reducing production hours — removing design from the equation democratizes the entire digital ad process. Now, anyone with writing chops and an understanding of their audience can place effective digital advertisements on preferred websites.
Advertisers also benefit from customization opportunities unlocked by native ads. In display campaigns, customizing ad copy to specific audiences and websites requires big budgets and lots of programming time. But in native ad campaigns, advertisers provide copy to publishers through plain text. This means marketers can customize headlines and descriptions as fast as they can type.
In the Reddit example, an advertiser’s /r/dataisbeautiful headline could focus on data-based benefits of a product while a sponsored post in /r/todayilearned could begin with the feed’s customary TIL: headline. These simple copy changes require minimal effort but improve user experience by catering to specific audiences in each subreddit.
Get Started with Native Ads
Moving away from display ads on publisher sites might seem like a scary new frontier in digital advertising. But advertisers and publishers alike have a lot to gain from the new format (read more on that here).
The list of publishers supporting native ad formats is growing every day. If you want to get started now, check out the self-serve tools on Reddit and StockTwits.
