If you've ever followed Upworthy or Buzzfeed on social media, you'll know that those terribly clickable, shareable pieces of content that they deal in are a bit of a temptation.
And more often than not, a time trap: "where did that last hour go?" Between Upworthy's vague headlines that make you want to read more, and Buzzfeed's love for the listicle, they've figured out how to hook and engage their audience with both content and advertising.
Being 'native' to native advertising hasn't done these two any harm either, since they worked to develop integrated partnerships with advertisers who want to get on board the content marketing zeitgeist from the start. Being seen by their consumers as a part of the Buzzfeed bandwagon could be said to increase their coolness cachet tenfold.
Publishers have a vested interest in making native into a workable model, since they can charge more for spots that complement the editorial. Of course, the demise of the Sunday People – which was being held up only at the start of the year as the vanguard of the new native frontier by adopting a fully-native revenue model – goes to show that the excitement among publishers is tangible, but the reality of making this work is more complex than first imagined.
Hopefully the more cautious approach adopted by the New York Times – who unveiled its first native ad units at the start of 2014 alongside the usual display ads – will pay off in time. Indeed this is a publisher whose strategic approach to exploring new revenue streams paid off at the end of 2013 when it announced a year on year profit growth from $35.4m(£21.2m) in Q4 2012 to $68.9m a year later.
The reason for the rise was in large part down to their successful paywall model, so now it has the devoted paying readership we'll no doubt see that NYT's 2014 focus will centre around that age-old issue of how to push up advertising CPMs. By definition, native advertising is an integration of commercial and editorial enterprises. Scaling up an operation that requires an editorial eye to sign off on a piece of ad content essentially limits publishers to how fast an editor can read.
At first glance, it may seem impossible to trade native advertising space using a real-time bidding (RTB) auction model, which publishers have been adopting across the board, in favour of its fast, efficient method of buying and selling inventory. The lure of RTB is that it promises great scale at low costs – but how to reconcile a fast, technical approach with the human eye of a conscientious editor?
The answer is that publishers will need to start measuring native ads for their relevancy factor, and adjusting pricing models accordingly. As soon as we can get the right tracking in place to match up stories with relevant ads then an ad can be reviewed within seconds, with the advertiser being charged based on their viewability factor.
The likeability of native ads is obvious: research conducted by Sharethrough and IPG found that consumers engaged with native ads 53% more frequently than traditional display ads. 32% of their survey respondents also said they would share a native ad with someone they know. This kind of engagement level needs to take into account more semantic metrics to be able to measure effectiveness ratherthan click rates.
The bounce rate – the percentage of users who "bounced" off the site at the first page they entered, as opposed to staying and engaging longer with the content – and the dwell time, the amount of time a user stopped on a page to read, will need to be factored in to measure and adapt the pricing of native within an RTB model, which is completely different from how today's ad spots are sold and measured.
For advertisers, native will also mean that an element of letting go is necessary. They need to be comfortable working to native templates or technology that will deliver ads in a native format that will adjust depending on readership. An example of a kind of adaptable marketing technique that's working well today is auto-optimised ads, where the advert is dynamically created and always optimised dependent on the profile of the user. Are you female living in London?
You might be more likely to respond to a silver car, rather than a red one, for example. The same kind of real-time optimisation will need to be a cornerstone of the native market, if it's going to work and remain agile when it comes to interesting and relevant to various nuanced pieces of content around it. To make this happen – and to create this genuinely one-to-one personalised approach at scale – marketers will largely need to let go of their control on creative output.
There will no doubt be charlatans who emerge from the woodwork, offering up native ad spots which aren't optimised effectively and in places advertisers don't want them. When it comes to native – as with most ad formats – brand safety is a key consideration, as is the viewability of ads. "Did someone actually see my ad?" is a question that brands have a right to ask when it comes to digital marketing, and thanks to tracking technologies being developed by the likes of Doubleverify, Integral Ad Science and more, this can now be reported on with decent accuracy.
Advertisers want sexier, more impactful branding online and although this will be a complex one to generate, there is incentive by all to make it work. Last year the New York Times' profit successes could be attributed in most part due to its successful paywall rollout, with a 19% increase in subscribers to its paid content model in 2013.
Now other media owners will be keeping a hawk eye on the progress of its native operation, with the NYT becoming the latest beacon of hope to media owners whose need to monetise clickable and shareable content has been willing this model forward for years now. If we get the nuts and bolts ironed out by focussing on developing a sophisticated, editorial-consistent method of tracking ad relevancy at lightning speed, then it's true that where there's a will, there's a way.
Jon Baron is CEO of TagMan
Get more articles like this sent direct to your inbox by signing up for free membership to the Guardian Media Network – brought to you by Guardian Professional
