Native advertising has been a hot topic for the past year, and it continues to make the headlines this year as well (here, for example).
There’s a particular opinion circulating around that native advertising will soon see its demise.
Does it remind you of anything? Like, for instance, “the death of blogging,” “the death of SEO,” “the death of social media.” Yes, we’ve been through the “death of _____” multiple times already, so witnessing yet another marketing technique experiencing its supposed demise isn’t a surprise anymore.
Some Quick Facts
Native advertising is here to stay. Let’s just make peace with it.
In fact, it’s been around for many years now. Various brands and corporations have been using the concept of native ads to advertise myriads of products or services. The only difference is that they did never call it native ads.
For example, here’s a quote from the aforementioned article:
“[…] Disney – owner of ESPN, ABC News, and other media networks – repeatedly produces films, books, and reports that are native ads for the theme parks and real estate ventures […]”
This makes a lot of sense.
And the only difference between then and now is that at some point someone decided to bring the term “native ads” into existence. But this doesn’t mean that it’s going to die all of a sudden because of it.
Content vs. Ads
One of the main problems that some people see with native ads is that you can’t always tell the difference between ads and content.
But the fact is that in today’s world they are often both the same thing. Every piece of content is a native ad for something.
It’s really impossible to write an article, or a blog post that wouldn’t mention a brand, or a tool, or basically another business that has an offering of any kind. And once such businesses do get mentioned, it’s by default a native ad.
So the question is this: Should we really try to differentiate?
We’ll let you answer this on your own, and for now let’s just focus on what we’d advise affiliates to do.
Native Advertising for Affiliates
The recipe is simple:
Create good content that’s helpful to your readers or audience. And If you do feel that their experience can be enriched by using ______(a brand / product) then by all means let them know about it.