Native Advertising Sucks.
Content Marketing Fails.
PR Is It.
Indeed. In theory it’s a smart idea, this native advertising thingy. And it’s true in a way. As is the idea of content marketing.
We are talking about the idea, that there must be a way to place messages within apps, games, media, social networks — in a way that is not intrusive but nativ (what is, if you think about it, a silly word, because it suggests there would be kind of a natural law for technology and other manmade things. But this is a common misconception in a lot of Anglo-Saxon discussions).
More precisely: the idea to embed messages into their environment
in a way that users see them as part of the original offering and not as distracting.
There has been roughly one year of experience now
And this is a bit disillusioning. To be honest, I have been curious about what colleagues from the advertising industry might come up with for native advertising. But results have either been coverted advertising (what did not work in the past and will not now, putting all ethical and/or legal questions aside) or badly executed advertorials that even tend to harm their host.
Most examples I have seen (mainly in my home market Germany but some abroad as well) really suck. Other than with traditional advertorials that are often produced by the editors of a media outlet themselves, I see a lot of native stuff that is so poorly written or even poorly thought, that users facing it are irritated about the quality — and think that their beloved medium, blog, magazine, or whatever has gone mad. So the parasite is destroying its host — to keep the wrong nature analogy going. The actual implosion of some MCN on YouTube here in Europe might be one symptom of this.
Most brand or company issued online magazines I have seen last year look like the simulation of feel-good-journalism. Yes, they get traffic — both from social and search — and get their content marketed across the web. But they are as credible as a medium as feel-good-journalism-simulation always has been, e.g. most of the hardcore yellows and gossip media.
I bet both — native advertising and content marketing — are really successful on a short term if you put the right key performance indicators into place. But they fail big time when it comes to brand building aka marketing.
But to be crystal clear on this: I think it’s correct and there is need to try to overcome the problem all communication faces right now: that most messages are seen as intrusive and irrelevant by the users we want to reach with exactly these messages.
This is why I share the idea behind native advertising and content marketing
But I go for another solution for the same problem. Call me naive, but I believe in intelligence and substance. I believe in relevant arguments and not in simulating relevance. This is why I now go back to PR — and will join Cohn & Wolfe as Managing Director for Germany in April.
Modern, creative, and smart PR is the best and most sustainable solution
for the challenges marketing is facing today — now that the short
period of mass media comes to an end after only 175 years.
A bit oversimplified the task at hand is not story telling nor story doing — but being part of the stories people tell. In media, in networks, in their blogs, or community meetings.
I am convinced:
If you only want to deliver your messages less intrusive, more native, and if you just want to market your messages better through content, you did not understand the need of our time.
This is a translation of my German blog post about this topic. There you will find as well some links to (German) examples that might shed more light on why I’m talking about this right now. Besides the decision to join PR again and be part of the Cohn & Wolfe family, what I’m really looking forward to.
