The Native-First Marketing Strategy: Focus on the Advertising that Matters

With digital media consumption trending fast to overtake TV (see here) due solely to growth in mobile, it’s clear why marketers are quickly shifting traditional dollars into mobile advertising (reported here last week).

An obvious statement is that not all mobile advertising opportunities are created equal.  To dig deeper on where the best opportunities exist, it starts with the end-user experience in mind. Mobile is inherently personal to the owner of the device. Therefore, all the resulting experiences have to be at the pleasure of the owner or they will quickly move on to another site or app. The advertising has to obey these same principles too. The ads should flow within the stream of the content and their creatives should also obey the same formatting characteristics of the content too. Think about how you engage with pop-up banners that interrupt your content vs an in-feed ad that promotes the type of shoes that you’ve been searching.

These ad formats are called “native”. The original native ad format was search and has increasingly become the ad format of choice for all leading publishers.

Native has become the category of advertising where marketers will win or lose in keeping up with the consumer journey. All of the most influential publishers in the world connect with their audiences natively in-feed such as Facebook’s Carousel Ads, Pinterest’s Search Ads, Snapchat’s Snap Ads, and Google or Bing’s shopping ads. For marketing, we are now in a native-1st world.

In the mobile-1st world, it has become increasingly difficult for a marketer to be quick enough to engage with consumers throughout their journey. Maximizing growth and executing cross-journey, storytelling across the leading publishers, is far from simple.
Some of the key challenges we hear from CMO’s and marketing leaders across leading brands are:

• Reconciling across differing publisher standards, policies and measurement
• Capturing, interpreting and actioning from consumer interest and intent signals across disparate publishers
• Incorporating continuous new publisher innovations
• Integrating advertising campaigns into a brand’s overall marketing program (strategy, execution, technology)

Agile Marketing technology can help overcome this cross-publisher friction to achieve the benefits of storytelling marketing on native using:

• Custom-tailored business goals that can be applied appropriately across disparate publisher platforms
• Flexible campaign structures that allow for the dynamic management of publishers and ad formats
• Capturing real-time consumer interest and intent signals across the multi-publisher journey
• High-speed budgeting allocation and bidding decisioning based upon optimizing for the next incremental portion of spend
• Efficient mechanisms to scale tedious, yet critical, campaign operational tasks
• Open platform that allows for efficient data sharing (input and output) across a marketing organization’s tech stack for best-of-breed

Native ads will drive 74% of all ad revenue by 2021 according to BusinessInsider. Brands are at peril if they are not working to master their native storytelling cross-publisher.

To hear more about Native First, check out our video below from our recent K8 Summit or CONTACT US directly.