Dive Brief:
- Research from Trusted Media Brands found 45% of marketers reported plans to incorporate native ads into their strategies this year, down from 50% in 2015.
- The findings come at a time when marketers and agencies are taking a closer look at the effectiveness of native ads, as well as increased oversight and potential enforcement from the Federal Trade Commission.
- Meanwhile, Digiday reports newer digital publishers such as Gawker and BuzzFeed are hitting traffic growth rate walls while more entrenched traditional publishers such as the Wall Street Journal Online, Hearst Digital Media and Condé Nast Digital are all seeing digital traffic gains.
Dive Insight:
It could be said that 2015 was the height of native advertising. The format received a lot of buzz, and according to MediaRadar research cited by Digiday, from January to November the number of native advertisers increased 136%. At the same time, research from Trusted Media Brands found the number of marketers planning on running native ads this year is down 5% from 2015.
About the status of native advertising, Steve Rubel, chief content officer at Edelman, told Digiday, "I think native’s stabilized. The buzz is dying down, with the growing focus on the distributed model, which works less well for native."
And Alan Smith, chief digital officer at Assembly, explained to Digiday, "It’s labor-intensive beyond belief, because there are so many companies that need to be part of it — the creative agency, sometimes the PR agency and the publisher and sometimes the editorial side of the company."
One issue facing native advertising is that the FTC is cracking down on how those ads are presented, and making sure consumers realize the ads are in fact ads and not editorial content. This concern isn’t unfounded as research from Grady College in Georgia found a majority of consumers couldn’t tell the difference between native ads and editorial content.
