Lesson 13 – Native Advertising and Sponsored Content

In this lesson, we are going to discuss native advertising and sponsored content. Native advertising is a very important part of digital marketing and most of my success with advertising online has been with Native advertising.

Native advertising is so powerful that some people consider that it is a bit unethical. Because with native ads, you cannot always make out if it is an ad or not. In general, people do not like ads and we turn a blind eye towards it. So when the ads are disguised as content, we pay attention to it.

For example, news feed ads on Facebook are not always very obvious that they are ads. There is a small word written near the name of the posted which says it is sponsored content. Sponsored content is almost the same as native ads, but it is very clear to the user that the ads are sponsored. Both the concepts have gray areas and sometimes overlap each other.

Native advertising is not just limited to digital marketing. Even TV, Magazines, and Newspapers have native ads. In the above video, I have also discussed a movie which is based on native ads. Even today, you see Aston Martins and Sony gadgets in 007 movies. They are called product placements and they are nothing but native ads.

Newspapers and magazines show advertorials. They look like content written by the authors and editors of the magazine but they are just ads. It is not always obvious and in a corner, they would have mentioned that it is an ad, usually referred to as ‘Advertorial’. I am sure that you may have noticed such advertorials yourself!