Why native advertising is the next hot trend in PR
Going native? More and more PR agencies are waking up to the fact that they are the natural suppliers of native advertising for their clients, says this PR industry insider.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau UK found nine of ten PR pros think native ads are an opportunity for PR. Seventy-five percent said they think PR should lead native ad programs.
Native ads are ads that look like the editorial content of the online site that accepts them. Obviously native ads obscure the boundary between news and advertising, the line between seamless design and intentional deception.
Publishers want native ads to be plausible enough as news to attract advertisers, but not so native that they deceive readers into thinking paid content was earned.
Another issue: Who actually writes the ad copy. Digiday ran a good examination of this issue in 2014:
The common approach, also taken by Digiday, is to set up separate teams. That’s led to the growth of brand content units at Gawker, The Huffington Post and The New York Times.
Yet for publishers outside the hard news business … the church-state divide is not as strong.
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