We were excited to be a part of the recent IAB round table discussion on Native Advertising Disclosures at the beginning of this month and while preparing for the panel we conducted several consumer surveys.

The surveys asked consumers to identify various advertising and content widgets as advertisements or editorially recommended content. Over two hundred and twenty highly educated, web savvy consumers reviewed the images and were given the same question and answer choices throughout the survey.  The only differentiator for each of the questions was the content recommendation widget shown. All consumers were instructed to answer if the images were one of the following: Advertisements, Articles that Paid to be promoted by the Website, Articles Recommended by the Website’s Editors, or that they didn’t know.

The results were extremely interesting and confirmed that clear labeling of widgets is important to help consumers identify paid ads from editorially recommended content. While it’s encouraging that the majority of consumers correctly identified paid units as being paid promotion or as outright advertising, there is evidence that labeling the advertising widgets with language that clearly indicates that it is advertising further reduces any misconception that consumers may have about the units.

Click here for final survey results 

If you are in NYC tomorrow, December 4th or have time to join remotely check out the IAB’s Native Disclosure Workshop that is revisiting the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) panel held last year at this time.

The 2013 “Blurred Lines” Workshop in Washington DC addressed the very real issue that has been affecting our industry, disclosure and transparency in labeling ad units. On the one year anniversary the IAB has re-grouped Laura Sullivan, Senior Staff Attorney, Division of Advertising Practices of the FTC plus IAB members and others who met in DC for a discussion on native disclosure. They will be specifically addressing: What has changed in the past year, what have we learned, and what might transpire in 2015?

Our own SVP, Jon Carmen, will be on the panel speaking to the policy that Adblade has practiced since the beginning, we label our ad units clearly as advertisements.

November 21, 2014–comScore released their monthly ranking of U.S. online activity at the top digital media properties for October 2014 based on data from the comScore Media Metrix and the Media Metrix Multi-Platform services. Adblade is listed among the Top 20 Ad Networks Rankings and is the 18th largest Ad Network. To see the rest of the release click here.

November 10, 2014–Quantcast, a leading technology and real-time advertising company, today released a list of the top 20 global ad networks and platforms with public Quantcast Measure profiles. At the top of the list was Rubicon Project, with a reach of 544 million people globally in October. The list, which can be found at www.quantcast.com/inside-quantcast, is the first in a quarterly series. It includes representation across the advertising ecosystem, from ad exchanges, such as OpenX, to platforms focused on specialized ad units, such as GumGum.

“The Top Global Ad Networks and Platforms List provides insight into the makeup of the global online advertising ecosystem and the power that Quantcast Measure brings to ad networks and platforms for validation and demonstration of their audience composition and reach,” said Jag Duggal, senior vice president of Product Management for Quantcast. “At the top of the list are supply-side platforms and ad-exchange platforms that connect buyers and sellers globally.”

“Premium publishers and Web applications are increasingly adopting advertising automation technology to help them reach audiences globally,” commented Gregory R. Raifman, president, Rubicon Project. “Ranking No. 1 on the Quantcast list is proof that Rubicon Project is the top choice for those who seek unprecedented global reach and scale.”

Adblade, a content advertising platform, also lands in the top five, demonstrating the wide adoption of content-based advertising. Ash Nashed, founder and CEO of Adblade, commented: “Quantcast has been a very valuable tool for us over the years and has helped us demonstrate our rapid audience growth and quality to both advertisers and publishers across the U.S. and worldwide.”

Online video is represented by SpotXchange and AnyClip, both video advertising platforms. Ad networks continue to play an important role: J Carter Marketing, engage:BDR and IDG TechNetwork are just a few examples that appear in the top 20.

The Top Global Ad Networks and Platforms List demonstrates how the infrastructure for digital advertising has expanded globally. Nine of the 20 entities reached the majority of their audiences outside of the U.S. Using Quantcast Measure, ad networks and platforms can track their global reach, as well as gain insight into their audience composition.

The Top Global Ad Networks and Platforms List draws from ad networks and platforms that are directly measured by Quantcast Measure and have chosen to share their traffic profile publicly. Entities are ranked by their global 30-day people number, which is a modeled number that represents the unduplicated audience reach across an entity’s Web and mobile Web properties. The Top Global Ad Networks and Platforms List only includes entities that work with third-party publishers to monetize their inventory with advertising. Publishers that sell advertising, but exclusively against their owned and operated properties, are not included.

About Quantcast
Quantcast is a technology company specialized in real-time advertising and audience measurement. As the pioneer of direct audience measurement in 2006, Quantcast has the most in-depth understanding of digital audiences across Web and mobile, allowing marketers and publishers to make the smartest choices as they buy and sell the most effective targeted advertising on the market. More than 1,000 brands rely on Quantcast for real-time advertising. As the leader in Big Data for the digital advertising industry, Quantcast directly measures more than 100 million Web destinations, incorporates over 1 trillion new data records every month and continuously processes as much as 30 petabytes of data every day. Quantcast is headquartered in San Francisco and is backed by Founders Fund, Polaris Venture Partners and Cisco Systems. For more information, visit www.quantcast.com.

October 15, 2014 – Adiant, the largest native advertising platform on the web and owner of Adblade and IndustryBrains, are thrilled to announce an integration with LiveRamp’s data onboarding service.  The integration will allow advertisers to use their own customer data for retargeting across the largest proprietary native advertising platform on the Web.  Advertisers will benefit from more targeted campaigns that produce higher click-through rates and increased conversions to more qualified customers.

Through a process called data onboarding, Adiant advertisers will now be able to define audience segments based on attributes in their customer databases – such as past purchase history and customer lifetime value – and then anonymize and deliver those segments to Adiant for retargeting.

“Adiant again raises the bar in native advertising, giving advertisers powerful audience targeting within our massive “in content” advertising platform now reaching 553 million unique users monthly,” said CEO Ash Nashed. “We’ll continue to provide cutting-edge solutions advertisers and publishers are looking for as the industry evolves, making sure we offer the best technology available and the highest quality and properly labeled native advertising platform.  Providing high quality advertisers with the ability to use their customer data to retarget Adiant’s in content placements at scale creates completely new ways for advertisers to interact with users.  It also makes our premium publishing partner’s inventory more valuable in terms of generating higher CPMs.”

“We’re excited to help Adiant customers realize even greater value by connecting Adiant to valuable customer data sources, ” said Auren Hoffman, CEO of LiveRamp. “By onboarding customer data, advertisers can benefit from proven data-driven marketing strategies, such as CRM retargeting, ad suppression, and look-alike modeling.”

Adiant, owner of Adblade and IndustryBrains has direct first party relationships with over 1,000 local and national branded digital properties, including publishers such as McClatchy Newspapers, Worldnow, Lee Enterprises, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Times, ABC News, Hearst and hundreds more.  Adiant helps agencies and advertisers successfully connect with qualified customers with properly labeled “in content” style native advertising placements in highly credible environments at the right time – when they are browsing for quality information.

About Adiant Adiant is a digital media technology company whose mission is to deliver the most innovative advertising solutions to quality publishers and advertisers. Our brands have been engineered from the ground up to offer both immediate and long-term sustained value with a high level of customer service. For more information visit http://www.adiant.com

About LiveRamp LiveRamp connects data across more than 100 digital marketing applications.  By onboarding customer data into the measurement, targeting, and personalization applications developed by our partners, we help leading brands eliminate data silos and run more efficient marketing programs.  For more information, visit http://www.liveramp.com

Why Native Ads Need Credibility, Targeting and Scale
Native advertising is growing rapidly, but many marketers are still learning how to use it to its full potential. Currently, marketers seem to undervalue credibility, targeting and scale – the three critical ingredients for effective native advertising. If you’re new to native ads or struggling to make them work for you, it may be helpful to rebuild your approach around these three concepts.

The Power of Credibility.
Native ads were not designed to proclaim your product like a banner ad. Rather, they intend to highlight the benefits, credibility, knowledge and personality of your brand. Conveying a positive impression requires proper disclosure of ads and legitimate content, but it also relies on the credibility of the publisher sites on which you appear.

For example, native ads on sites such as The New York Times would carry more weight than ads on news sites that slap together borrowed content. Our expectation that we will read rational ideas and well-reported news on a particular publication lends credibility to all the content that appears on the site.  Unlike top tier publishers, sites with low content standards undermine your reputation and the value of your content.

So let’s say your company makes automobile accessories and you developed a pickup truck grille guard for the forthcoming aluminum Ford F-150.  You just wrote a polished article about the F-150 for your own blog that demonstrates your knowledge of pickup trucks and suggests that your auto accessories are going to draw on this technical depth. You can use native ads to draw readers to your article from credible sites such as major market or national news brands.

You can also drive readers to content that belongs to an independent publisher. For example, if Motor Trend gave your grille guard a positive mention, you could use native advertising to drive people to that article. At a minimum, you have to deliver people from a credible site to a credible article to make a positive impression on your audience.

The Need for Targeting.
In addition to achieving credibility, you need to target native ads at a very specific demographic. The F-150 is the bestselling pickup in the U.S., but it’s not of interest to everyone. So, it makes sense to target people who would care about your product and content because it would be more cost-efficient than targeting everyone. First-party data is a good start, but complementing it with third-party data would allow you to target people based on their internet search behavior, such as searching for after-market truck accessories.

Targeting the right person includes reaching them when they are in the right mindset. For example, Facebook might be great context for humor and entertaining content that friends like to pass around, but it’s not necessarily the best place for content with an educational edge. Instead, that content may work better on news sites, digital magazines and blogs where people go to learn. 

The Need for Scale
If targeting is about reaching the right people, then scale is about reaching a large number of people in your audience, not any audience. Great content only makes an impact when it reaches the right people in sufficient volume.

The only way to scale is to find your audience across a wide variety of relevant, high-quality sites. Working one-on-one with publishers is terribly inefficient when you need to reach 100+ million people. Instead, you should rely on native ad platforms that have large scale, can leverage third-party data, and can reach your audience through multiple channels.

Native Ad platforms enable you to scale up quickly and allow real-time marketing in response to hot news stories. For example, if you get a positive review, that’s a good time for you to promote the article and publicize the benefits of your product.

Great media content is rendered ineffective every day because it becomes lost on low-quality sites, is distributed poorly and fails to reach enough of the people that would care about the message. Ensuring your efforts consider credibility, proper targeting and scale is core to fully leveraging the power of native advertising.

What are some of the ways brands can keep native ads honest?
We think it’s actually easy for brands to keep native ads honest.  First and foremost, make sure your native ad provider explains how they protect brands, publishers and consumers from misleading practices. Does your native ad provider go as far as manually reviewing and approving ads and landing pages to ensure brands are disclosing content properly and consumers are protected? We can’t stress enough the importance of clearly labeling ad units and invite all native advertising companies to embrace best disclosure practices.

Second, ensure the use of transparent header language for native units and widgets. We recommend, “Offers and Articles from Around the Web.” This header clearly explains the mix of ads and content with which a consumer is about to engage. Headers such as “Recommended” or “More in the News” are simply misleading and we have strongly discouraged their use in the industry.

Next, if it’s an ad, make sure you tell the consumer. Many units integrate editorial content with ads. On some news sites, units have as many as eight thumbnails that alternate content with ads. As John Oliver mentioned, we understand that a consumer may not be able to distinguish ads from content across the several thumbnails. Ideally, true editorial content should be separated from ads promoting advertorial content. An alternative is to ensure the disclosure explains that the entire unit contains ads.

And finally, extend proper disclosure practices to landing pages. This practice is in the marketer’s own best interest. Even when a consumer sees our properly disclosed native ad, they could mistake advertorial landing pages for unbiased editorial content.  Better disclosure leads to better results. Marketers will benefit from better engagement if they extend the practice of proper disclosures to their landing pages.

For press inquires or to learn more about Adblade please email us by clicking here.

According to a recent AdWeek article, 46 percent of Millennials consume the content within the native ads that reach them. For context, native ads appear placed within the content of a website with a look and feel that closely matches the publisher. This makes the ad simple, unobtrusive, and easier to consume. These ads are more like previews to content and offers, and less like display ads that serve as a call-to-action that is increasingly disregarded.

DO’s
Do use what works Millennials are a generation that grew up on the Internet. Display ads are part of the online landscape that disappear into the background. In order to reach this influential and increasingly affluent demographic you should first shift media spending towards native ads, a format that your audience prefers. It’s no surprise that a recent IAB industry study confirmed that 60 percent of online news visitors are more open to advertising that focuses on a story.

Do use quality content as the hook Considering that Millennials grew up with mobile devices, they are quick to consume information. To encourage discerning Millennials to engage, native ads need to be bright and brief. In order to hold your audience’s attention as they quickly engage, you need to offer immediate value or entertainment through your content.

Do understand performance metrics and the future of the industry Native ads perform better than display ads based on several metrics. Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer notes the viewers of native ads are 3.6 times more likely to conduct branded searches, than viewers of traditional ads. Native ads are representative of the future of online advertising, where the messaging is more subtle and the viewer is more likely to receive value for engaging.

Do be authentic Some brands are producing native ads that resemble the look and feel of a consumer’s own content. You have to be careful with this approach because Millennials are a discerning group that quickly sees through inauthentic messages. Consider how your product or service enables your customer and celebrate it. The Vans® brand has used this approach to great success on social media. Do pick the right outlets In order to reach Millennials, you need to be sure you’re advertising on the right types of sites. Aggregated news content sites are used extensively by Millennials and should be a top choice for advertisers. Reach your audience through a broad network before trying niche, siloed outlets to reach smaller pockets of Millennials.

DON’Ts
Do not just make digital advertorials While many native ads do work well as basic advertorials, it’s important to consider other approaches. User-generated content and social networks help build native ads and content into campaigns, beyond stand-alone messages. For example, Ford created the “Fiestagram” on Instagram that showcased the lifestyle of owners as they interacted with the car. The images and interactions, native to Instagram, helped Ford share its brand sentiment and grow its social media presence.

Do not forget mobile optimization All native ads need to be structured so they are easily clicked and read when the user is on a tablet or smartphone. Millennials are a mobile generation that consume content and perform a range of daily functions without ever needing a computer. Make it easy for them to interact with native ads by ensuring they look great on mobile devices.

Do not be irrelevant Native advertising content must be relevant to the typical user and be a logical fit for the chosen outlet. Otherwise, the content will “stand out” in a negative way as a poorly executed ad instead of a possible source of interesting content.

Do not present a novel-length ad Even the most exciting content won’t attract busy Millennials if it’s too lengthy. Brief and visually interesting ads are ideal, especially those that prompt some sort of emotional connection. In order to interject humor, it’s important to not try too hard to be cool. Think in quick, broad, and respectful terms when incorporating humor into your ads.

Do not interrupt The benefit of native ads is that they blend in to the content and present information in an unobtrusive way. Avoid being tricky with native ads, misleading consumers, or complicating an online task such as reading or moving from one piece of content to another.

SUMMARY Millennials’ information consumption habits, love of technology, and use of mobile devices to do things quickly is making traditional digital ads increasingly less effective. When used properly, native advertising capitalize on these characteristics and enables brands to connect with Millennials the way they want to be engaged – in a simple, unobtrusive and easy to consume manner.

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