As the new year begins, PerformanceIN continues its annual tradition of connecting with performance marketing experts to get their single biggest prediction for the industry in 2017.
In this piece, Josh Payne, CEO of StackCommerce, predicts that this year native advertising will further secure its place as an essential format across the industry.
Native advertising is poised to become an essential component of every publisher’s monetisation toolkit by the end of 2017. With declining display ad performance, banner blindness and the prevalence of ad blockers, native advertising will go from being a key player to a requirement for the modern digital publisher.
The success of native advertising will likely extend beyond simply being a welcome alternative to the struggles of traditional display ads into becoming a positive contributor to the overall reader experience. Consumers increasingly prefer their engagement with brands to feel more authentic and native advertising is a big step in that direction.
Of course, native advertising is and will continue to be a double-edged sword, and publishers must be in position to stand behind both the advertorial content and the offerings themselves to build trust with their readership. The concern about how publishers should present native advertisements has only heightened over the past months and the norms around site placement and attribution will surely solidify in the coming year.
These standards will ease consumers’ fear of being ‘tricked’ into an ad or commerce environment, and solidify native advertising as a welcomed component of the overarching reader experience. While 2016 was a year of trial and error, 2017 will surely birth new, established points of view on how to best build a well-rounded monetisation strategy.
This concept of a ‘well-rounded monetisation strategy’ will also likely reach beyond simply integrated extensions of brand advertising. We expect the definition of native to expand significantly and begin to include a multitude of in-feed commerce solutions.
A successful monetisation strategy will start to include a blend of tools including native shops, product feeds, native content, native video, social commerce, and yes, even display banner ads. This will often include working with third-party partners in addition to writing affiliate posts in-house. We’ve already seen publishers hiring in-house commerce managers to oversee these various channels and these efforts are expected to be much more widespread in 2017.