How Native Advertising Changed in 2015 — We Ask Jay Widlitz

Our guest today is Jay Widlitz the co-founder of Brandtale, which catalogues native advertising content being published across the web. He has spent several years working with advertisement and adops before creating Brandtale early last year. Both his current work with Brandtale and his previous work has given him a great amount of exposure to advertising and in particular native advertising.

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Because of this, we sat down with him to discuss native advertising in greater detail. Our discussion covered the emergence of native advertising and its evolution over the past couple of years, which publishers are achieving the most success with native advertising and why they are seeing success as opposed to others, and the reasons behind the consistent increase in the quality of the content used in native advertising and the effects this has on publishers as a whole.

What the themes of native content are being released right know, what’s changed recently?

There have been a lot of changes that happened from this time last year, even in three months ago to be honest. Some of the key trends we’re seeing are obviously to shift to mobile. Most of the publishers are all premium guys, getting 60–70% percent of their traffic from mobile. Most of that is coming from social; within a Facebook, Twitter browser, one or two page views per user, and they have to capitalize pretty quickly on that page view. When it comes to native content the user experience on mobile is really important. A lot of the times in the agency and publisher sale world, it’s created of beautiful content execution, with big images and page skins and they are sent to the agency to be flipped to the client for a win for everybody. But now it’s really turning the conversation on its head and saying; ok, this is beautiful, but for 80% of my traffic on mobile, what does this content experience look like? How do I make sure the user experience is pretty on desktop? How does that reflect my brand? How does my massage come across in the mobile environment? That’s probably the biggest trend.

Bottom Line: Native content must perform well on mobile to be effective in 2016.

Do you think that to produce native content [at a high level] that you need the dedicated in-house studio?

Yes, for sure. That surpassed these five and probably closes to half of our publishers on our site. Whether it’s a studio or in-house agency or just clever branded division, these teams are focused on advertising solutions and that goes from pre RFP. They are creating from packages and offline events from the RFP response and creative ideas and what it actually takes to win a deal, to the content writers who are executing that deal and even pass that to the folks in the audience extension and reporting and brand survey to make sure everything goes to plan and really blows the expectations out of the water.

Bottom Line: The best native content is produced by teams with the proper skills and 100% dedicated to it.

I remember maybe six months ago when general world was becoming aware of native content. There was a debate about what will this do to editorial standards of these publications. Is this debate still happening or is everyone comfortable with how these publishers organize themselves now?

I am sure it’s still happening. In my circles certainly not, because we’re so embed with media content. From a general user standpoint I am sure there are some cases where there’s a bit of trickery or people do feel a little duped. I think there’s been a more conscious effort from the publisher side of things, even from legal folks in the brand side should disclose what’s happening. Is it a piece of sponsored content that the brand paid for. All these conversations are still going on, but this stuff is so mainstream that I think it’s beaten out or just tired out the general user from caring about it. They read content from their friends anytime, there’s no reason for what’s brand paying for could be any worse. In that “corner” these brands are working with these publishers and there is 30 people on these campaigns and the budget can go up to 7 figures. Chances are that final product is going to be better than what an editor had to write in 24h make its deadline. Sometimes they produce stories that publishers have been waiting months to write about, because they can produce huge budget productions that are going to be signed off to a client so I think this movement that’s happening has allowed a lot better journalism to take place and I think there’s a lot of publishers and some of the closest ones to us like the CNN, who would second that. They have stories that they want to write about, they’re super interesting that would get read over and over again without a client, but because someone enables it to happen it finally gets done and it does just as well.

Bottom Line: Native content receives additional resources and can therefore be higher quality than regular content.