Native Advertising’s popularity with consumers and advertisers alike has been rapidly growing over the past few years. Native Advertising – advertising that takes on the look and feel of the site on which it is placed – has continued to eat away at failing traditional display advertising’s revenues to become the leading new digital advertising format.
At Tapstone, we pioneered the use of Native Advertising for Direct Response style campaigns that drive tangible results, not just the brand elevation. Much like the Native Ad Industry, Tapstone is celebrating its successful growth over the past 12 months. But right now, we’re looking ahead to the future and here’s our take on what will be driving Native Advertising’s continued growth.
3 forces that will be powerful drivers for Native AdvertisingÂ
1.Consumers want information before they buy.
We are a generation of far more informed consumers than has ever gone before. Rarely now is a substantial purchase made without prior online research – reading reviews, scouring product education articles, watching user-generated videos and much more. That makes Tapstone’s Native for Direct Response approach – which pulls prospects from initial click on an appealing creative, through to in-depth advertorial content, before leading them to an advertiser’s desired action – the perfect advertising adjunct.
Native Advertising is an ideal way to deliver educational information about a product to the perfect target customer, creating a pipeline of highly informed prospects right to an advertiser’s digital front door. Fulfilling consumers’ needs to be informed before purchasing and an advertiser’s need to identifying motivated, educated targets that are ready to take the desired action.
2.Consumer desire to eliminate irrelevant and/or disruptive online advertising experiences.
Consumers are so used to the customizable experience that the internet has increasingly provided them (think Apple News that allows you to get only stories you are interested in) – that they just won’t stand for poorly targeted advertising that doesn’t apply to their interests and needs. At best these adverts won’t work. Consumers won’t click, products won’t get sold and money will be wasted. At worst, these poorly targeted advertisements cause such annoyance that they become a source of complaint and then the publisher loses its audience base too. Native Advertising will continue to be the format that advertisers can trust to meet their prospects in a way that serves rather than disrupts their online experience
3.Web and advertisement design will evolve to better match consumer’s intuitive online usage.
As consumers have become more and more experienced and expert with their internet usage over the past decade, we’ve seen digital design shifts to allow for this more intuitive use.
For example, do you know what a ‘hamburger’ is?
No, not the tasty meal kind, the web design kind? It’s that three-line icon (that looks a bit like a hamburger!) that is popping up on sites everywhere, instead of the clunky menu bars at the top of the page. (Interesting side note – web design icons that represent drop down menus seem to have a meat based nomenclature theme – three vertical dots are known as a ‘kebab’, while three horizontal dots are known as ‘meatballs’. Anyway, I digress…).
In 2018, we will witness a huge number of sites clearing text ruthlessly from their pages to move into iconographic led design. Tapstone predicts the same evolution will concurrently take place in the ads that those sites feature too – less emphasis on copy that spells everything out in long form, more focus on the shorthand and visual clarity that iconography can provide. This means ad creatives will need to be more visually ‘on point’ than ever before.
Those that don’t get on board with this clearer crisper design, run the same risk as those that target poorly – annoying the user by disrupting their otherwise ‘clean and serene’ web experience, and we all know that annoyed consumers are NOT the key to crushing KPI targets!
Again, Native Advertising will ride to the rescue to those that are stuck wondering how they can inform and educate their customers while clearing the text clutter out of their creative work. Native enables advertisers to entice prospects with glorious creative that will fit in well with these new cleaner sites, and then present them with in-depth education (which as previously mentioned, consumers want before making major purchases).
The reason for our success at Tapstone is our ability to forecast these industry trends and position our advertising clients at the forefront of them. If you want to tap our team’s experience to plan your 2018 success, schedule a consultation NOW!
