VIDEO: Dale Lovell on the DNA of native advertising success in 2017

This article is reproduced with thanks to Native Advertising Institute, a FIPP member. See the original article here. Jesper Laursen, CEO of Native Advertising Institute, will lead a panel discussion on native advertising at the 41st FIPP World Congress, 9-11 October 2017 in London, the UK. Meet him there.

Native Advertising Institute asked Dale Lovell, chief digital officer, from Adyoulike, a European leader in native advertising technology, who spoke at their Native Advertising DAYS 2016 conference in Berlin.

Below are highlights from the interview, which have been slightly edited for clarity.

Embrace technology to succeed

“To be a successful native advertiser you need the right mindset which is understanding the feed, understanding content, understanding advertising and embracing technology and programmatic. Really the convergence of creativity, storytelling and technology and data that is now available with programmatic native means that you as a marketer have a real key for success.”

Be a pioneer

“The mindset that [marketers] need to adopt is a kind of pioneering spirit. They need to effectively almost be startups within their own organisations. Native advertising is a new ad medium, or relatively new, for a lot of businesses. You need to embrace the opportunity and really think of yourselves as change agents within your organisation whether that’s a small business or a very large organisation.”

The social media feed is the new TV

“If you look back to the sixties and seventies, your audience congregated around the TV set. They sat there, they watched TV, they were captured audiences engaging with content that was kind of pushed down towards them for eight-nine hours a day. 

The TV viewing as a whole has declined over the last few years and where has it declined to? Where has it moved to? It has moved to the [social media] feed. You look at your phone on average 51 times a day and I think that’s probably too low for the Millennial audiences. It’s probably more like a 150 times a day. And ultimately that is where you’re engaging with content and with feeds. So that is where your audience is these days.”

Dale Lovell is featured in 23 Predictions for Native Advertising 2017 

Native can be a standalone product for advertisers

“Native certainly can stand alone. If you look at big publisher entities that are embracing native like BuzzFeed, which is a 100 per cent native advertising business, it certainly can stand alone. That’s not to disparage display and other forms of of online advertising. I think they all have a place in the marketing mix, but ultimately native advertising over the last few years has matured and really is a standalone product for major advertisers around the world.”

How to deal with objections to native

“How do you deal with objections to native? You know the first step is to quote the fact that the market [for native advertising] is going to be worth $59 US billion dollars by 2018, so that sometimes engenders change within an organisation.

The main objections that you see to native I feel are around editorial control for brands. I think as an industry we’re pretty good at self-regulating that and as a market as a whole we work through those objections from that side of things.

Another kind of objection is labelling and disclosure. Personally again, I think the market is very evolved on that side of things. Platforms like Adyoulike would never integrate with a publisher without full disclosure, so that it’s ‘sponsored by’, ‘promoted by’ or ‘advertisement’ which we are increasingly using. From our point of view that’s a given. It’s the law as much as anything and then really you can’t run a campaign without [labelling]. I think once publishers and advertisers can understand that, they can realise where it fits really.”

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The native advertising pyramid

“The native product pyramid that I see from a publisher landscape is very much that you have your premium native product which is publisher created content on behalf of a brand, written in the publishers tone of voice, more often than not clearly labeled, clearly sponsored. 

And then you have native display in-feed units which are very much delivered at scale; primarily promoted branded content that has been created by a brand across publisher environments, and then in the bottom of the pyramid you have the content recommendation units, which most publishers are familiar with.

I think there’s a place for all of those within the native product set. It’s about an educational piece when you talk through these points with people that object to native advertising. Then they kind of understand the ecosystem a little bit more.”

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