Native advertising. Content marketing. Sponsored content. What are they?

The new jargon of digital advertising can leave anyone scratching their heads. Here’s a quick look at a three key terms and how we at The Local define them.

Content marketing

A form of marketing involving the creation of content that the intended audience will find relevant and useful, rather than annoying and distracting. The Content Marketing Institute describes it like this:

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Traditionally, content marketing didn’t necessarily require working together with an established publisher, with brands instead creating content in-house and distributing it via their own channels.

But now companies are increasingly turning to publishers for content marketing help, recognizing publishers have expertise that can make a brand’s own channels even stronger.

Sponsored content

Also called commercial or branded content, this is perhaps the most straightforward term in the content marketing sphere, covering any content (article, video, etc.) appearing in a publisher’s channel that has been paid for by an advertiser.

A sponsored article (like this one on The Local) is sponsored content in which the client was involved with the creation of the article. Another model, however, involved an advertiser paying a publisher to sponsor independent editorial content that is then packaged in a branded section.

The Guardian, for example makes a distinction between commercial content that is ‘supported by’ versus ‘sponsored by’ an advertiser. And Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet, for example, has Nordic telecom provider Telia sponsor the newspaper’s Silicon Valley correspondent and other content that appears in its ‘Digital Life’ section.

Native advertising

Coined in late 2011/2012, native advertising is now a major discussion topic in publishing and digital marketing circles across the world. Native adverting is commercial content that is editorial in nature and written in a way that mirrors the style and voice of the publishing channel in which it appears.

At its best, native advertising is clearly labelled and engages readers as much or even more than traditional news content, offering informative, entertaining, and relevant content they want to read, and which feel natural within the context of the channel in which they appear. At their worst, they are deceptive, overtly commercial offers that are poorly written and do little to engage the reader. (Read this piece from the Native Advertising Institute for a deeper look at what native advertising is and isn’t)

While native advertising is not without its critics (including the hilarious John Oliver), it commands an increasingly large share of spending on advertising, with some projecting that $21bn will be spent on native advertising by 2018, up from an already sizeable $4.7bn in 2013.