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Native Advertising, Converged Media Feed 'Content Economy' in 2013

This article is more than 10 years old.

Two weeks ago Gini Dietrich published an article about native advertising and its impact on public relations. The article was received with a bit of a boom, causing marketers and PR professionals alike to ask, “What is native advertising?” Dietrich writes:

Native advertising integrates high-quality content (what I’ll refer to as pull marketing vs. push marketing of the traditional media) into the organic experience of a given platform.”

Meaning, the digital content that marketers use would be seamless to the user experience, unlike other approaches that interrupt the content flow. While native advertising is picking up a lot of buzz in 2013, this isn’t a new concept.

David Armano

According to David Armano, managing director of Edelman Digital Chicago, the concept of native advertising has been around since 2006 when companies like IZEA first brought “sponsored content” to Twitter. There was a lot of controversy over sponsored content and appropriate disclosures at the time, but as the market has matured, so has the expectation of content within it.

“I think 2013 is a year that social marketing is truly entering a maturation phase where companies are getting smarter and more intentional about the results they want,” he said. “Many have already spent their time building up their base of followers, so now the focus turns to reaching them, getting them to take an action (like sharing content) or recommending a product/service to friends.”

While the market is ready to more aggressively take on native, or contextual, advertising, Armano asserts that there’s a convergence aspect that has a broader appeal than simply looking at advertising – which is limiting.

“Facebook promoted posts, for example, converges aspects of ‘paid,’ ‘owned,’ and ‘earned’ media when done right. A brand may own the content, then pay Facebook a fee to help boost the reach of that content. And if it's really good content, it gets liked, shared and commented on (all earned aspects),” he said. “Promoted posts are a great example of where these marketing categories all converge at once and obliterate firm lines – and silos.”

Traditional marketing structures have created these silos across organizations and barriers with their partners—many who carve out media buying separately in order to do it at scale. Many forward-thinking marketers are investing in converged media, but many companies are wrapped around the "orthodoxy" of executing and measuring more proven models. This is limiting. For example, Armano believes that tablet devices and mobile advancements are finally beginning to deliver a deathblow to print, albeit slowly. Behavior-based content consumption should dictate how companies are advertising.

“When you are on a subway or bus and you see people's noses buried in mobile devices vs. newspapers you may have seen ten or twenty years ago, then you have to ask yourself what they are doing on these mobile devices and how do you reach them there?” he said. “Behavior transcends sector and business type.”

So much so, that converged media, or even the more tactical approach of native advertising, will help to fuel the content economy in 2013.

“I'd go as far as to say that today, content is currency. Have you ever shared an infographic or clever picture just so you could be the first to get the credit from your peers? That's the content economy in action,” Armano said. “But we're talking high-quality content—at least in the eye of the beholder. It has to inspire them to take some kind of action like sharing or participating around it.”

Armano uses an example from Obama campaign as a case study for this kind of understanding and execution. The campaign continually produced assets, using numerous social-digital channels to circulate content, relying on supporters to further create and spread memes. "These aren't 30-second advertisements or billboards. If converged media is the engine—then it is content which acts as the fuel. Brands need to ask themselves how they supercharge the engine as media distinctions bleed into each other."

Creating the fuel, or content, is no easy task. It’s not as simple as giving writers a keyboard and saying, “go.” Tara Hunt recently wrote a well-publicized article on content development for digital use titled, “Let Me Wave My Magical Content Wand,” in which she discusses the challenges marketers face when non-users of social platforms push for platform use. She writes:

People who rarely use social networks love platforms…even when they, themselves, admit to not having enough time to use them. That’s pretty much what they see: platforms and the numbers… They’ll hint at being concerned about your expertise or ability to execute because you haven’t created accounts everywhere. They may even say, ‘It takes 5 minutes to set it up!’”

Unsurprising given that marketing, especially as metrics shift and evolve, is ripe for attack and is often mistakenly perceived as being easy. Hunt goes on to explain that those non-users don’t understand that “picking a platform means that you need to create ongoing content for that platform,” and that content development requires a strategy and ongoing production of said content. In order for converged media or native advertising, or even basic content-driven marketing to work, there has to be an ongoing influx of high-quality resources.

There are different ways to achieve this. Armano, for instance, has someone on his agency team focused on converged media for clients. Hunt recommends an internal resource that is passionate about content development and can sit at the core of company matters. Either approach can work depending on a company’s business model and budget, but the net result is that content strategists or converged media specialists are critical to ensuring a company’s place in the content economy.

“I believe that there's a new kind of team needed to make this all work best for companies and brands,” Armano said.

The investment in content development to this degree could be intimidating to smaller companies with shallow pockets. Armano believes that it’s the smaller companies, or more nimble goliaths, who can master converged media or native advertising, because it is still so new.

“We are talking about a model that blends a lot together, and the rules are still being written,” he said. “It's an opportunity for any business to look at their current set of resources no matter how limited—and ask themselves if they should do less somewhere else in order to at least try to gain proficiency here, pending they believe this is a viable model. I happen to believe it is.”