Native advertising is the new buzz expression. If you embed your content on someone else’s Website in such a way that it looks like their own content, their visitors may be more likely to click on the links or buy the products being advertised.
To a marketer this may seem like a slam dunk play. But to the consumer it could just be creepy and deceptive. The sense of betrayal one feels when discovering that content on a trusted Website was placed there by someone else for pay breaks the rapport between the consumer and both the publisher and the marketer.
Does it produce conversions? Absolutely. But is it reflective marketing? Only in the most clinical, technical sense.
A positive reflective experience leaves the consumer feeling good about the Website that sent them to your Website. Advertising, when clearly denoted as such, can create a great reflective experience. But native advertising — when it fades into the woodwork — sets you up for a negative experience if the consumer realizes what happened and regrets their decision to interact with you.
Reflective Marketing should always put brand value ahead of conversions. When you emphasize conversions in your marketing priorities and sacrifice consumer trust in the brand you shorten the lifespan of the brand and its reach. Consumers are less likely to search for brands they don’t trust, and if in their collective experiences they find that you use deceptive advertising practices to promote your brand they are far less likely to want to do business with you again.
The uneven quality of native advertising formats and channels makes it difficult to build a great reflective marketing strategy out of this complicated technique. What is more, the search engines are beginning to take a closer look at the links being placed in native advertisements. What seemed like a great idea a few months may now become a popular Website’s nightmare.
There is no need to turn to “new ideas” in marketing. Certain old ideas have withstood the test of time. Hence, all the belabored confusion over so-called “content marketing” (which is really just a misleading label for “content publishing”) is easily avoidable. And so it is with “native advertising”.
You’re a marketer. Your job is to help create and promote value for the brand. You don’t do that by confusing or deceiving consumers. You do it by executing in a competent and predictable manner with great integrity.
Content publishing is still being abused by over-aggressive marketers who are focusing on search engines. Serious content publishing has to focus on the real return on investment: the increase in consumer awareness and trust in the publisher and their content.
You can publish content on your own site or other sites; when you publish content beyond your own site, however, you must make a special effort to ensure that the consumer associated that content with your brand and not the other site’s brand. This is completely contrary to the false promises being made on behalf of native advertising.
Never sacrifice the value of a brand for the sake of impressing people with the latest parlor tricks in cheap marketing. You’ll come to regret those choices one way or another.
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