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Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/325830
ADVERTISING P r o m o t e d C o n t e n t C A N A D A W I D E M E D I A L I M I T E D But done right, they can enhance your precious credibility We Admit It: Native Ads Are Not a Silver Bullet U nless you've been living in a cave with a box set of Mad Men, you've likely been overrun with breathless marketer chatter about content marketing and, more recently, "native advertising." And if you're like most marketers, the ubiquity of those terms has done squat to help you understand them any better. Lucky for you, Canada Wide Media has been offering in-stream native solutions (we call our units "promoted content") for more than a year. And while there are not enough pages in this Canada Wide Media 40th Anniversary report to properly and thoroughly explain long form, editorially based marketing, what we can do is provide a list of top-line pitfalls and opportunities about migrating your never-clicked-on, interruptive banner ads into contextually sound, engaging stories about your brand's validity in your customer's lives. Well, we'll try, anyway. First off, why the rise in native ads? Back in the mid '90s, banner ads had click- through rates of 30, 40, even 70 per cent. Today, those rates aren't even a fraction of what they used to be. A famous analoy by a hyperbolic Buzz Feed exec estimates that you have a higher chance of summiting Everest than clicking on a banner ad. Banner blindness is very real. Just try to remember the last three banner ads you saw (never mind clicked on). Go ahead, I'll wait… See? Overall, native ads engage us more than banner ads The theory with ads is that in-context advertising is much more useful at capturing intent. For instance, the reason why Google Search ads (those highlighted irst results that pop up when you Google something) pour millions into the company's coffers every hour is that they are effective: it's contextual advertising that's there when people are looking for something speciic. Also, banner ads (at least most of them) can't be shared, which is a real shame. Native formats, on the other hand, rise above because if built properly, they can be shared, ranked and rated just like a piece of editorial. On several occasions on BCBusiness.ca, our native ads ranked higher than many solid pieces of editorial. On Forbes.com, a native ad describing the iPhone 5 that had launched that week was the most popular piece of content for many days on the site. Native ads are a brand's baby steps into brand journalism Brands want to be publishers. They ultimately want to own their channels of distribution, create their own wonderfully engaging content and try as much as possible to build their own audiences— relationships that will avoid the need to chase endorsements from those pesky tastemakers and gatekeepers known as journalists and the earned media gates they guard. For marketers unfamiliar with the whole "becoming a media company" promised land, or lacking the funds to launch their own branded newsroom, native advertising provides, at an atomic, inexpensive level, experimentation into that transition of becoming a media company. Native ads also provide that rush of engagement that a solid content marketing product delivers: time-on-site approaching two minutes (as opposed to the industry average of ive seconds for banner ads) A content-based ad campaign on BCBusiness.ca. p148-155-CWM40.indd 152 14-06-04 11:46 AM