Commentary
As Mobile and Social Grow, Advertising Will Shift To Feeds And Content
- by Max Kalehoff , November 12, 2013
Regardless, there is a tactical component of “native advertising” that most industry executives agree is real: advertising in feeds, or “in-feed advertising.” Thanks to years of constant emails and of ubiquitous adoption of smartphones, we’ve been conditioned with short attention spans and a lust to fire our synapses with an always-on feed of message impulses. Feeds are a natural venue for conversational and contextually relevant advertising and marketing content, which is why so much of it is social.
To be sure, the media landscape is creating a perfect storm to accelerate marketers’ adoption of in-feed advertising: According to eMarketer, U.S. average daily time spent with digital media (5 hours and 16 minutes) will surpass time spent conventional television (4 hours and 31 minutes) in 2013. Further, time spent with non-voice mobile online media (2 hours and 21 minutes) will surpass nonmobile online media (2 hours and 19 minutes) in 2013.
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Top mobile activities -- like social networking -- are best accessed through mobile apps, which is why apps dominate mobile minutes versus Web. And as far back as December 2012, Facebook dominated total U.S. mobile minutes with a 23% share among all apps, followed by Instagram with a 3% share, according to comScore. Of course, Facebook and Instagram are tailor-made for in-feed advertising.
Finally, as is evident from my company’s clients, Facebook’s Promoted Posts and similar in-feed formats in Twitter are not only dominant, but proving
highly effective for both branding and direct-response objectives. With unprecedented audience targeting and tracking capabilities, investment and sophistication levels are rising. While Instagram
just began testing in-feed advertising, our early monitoring of pilot campaigns shows that in-feed advertising in that venue is highly promising. We see the same for Pinterest.
These
trends point to a new advertising landscape. As consumer attention continues shifting to mobile, apps and social media, advertising will continue to shift to feeds and contextual content. Social and
in-feed advertising is not a niche, but a major pillar of advertising. It may become the center of gravity for all advertising.
Yes, "native advertising" is an unfortunate moniker. Because it is a new way of talking about a broad array of techniques that have indeed been around for a long time. So it can confuse and dilude the un-initiated. And, when a new brand/publisher does something "native" for the first time, it's also considered "new" and further's the confusion.
You're absolutely right about Feeds too, and Twitter's IPO and the market receptivity of their valuation should be some evidence to that end. Moreover, the Sony/Carrie "native ad" distributed almost exclusively via social is another good indicator. I am sure most of your readers were among the 50M who have viewed it so far:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlOxlSOr3_M
The movie was a flop but it was only $30M to make and it's grosses $34M so far. Considering it went out against Gravity and Captain Phillips, I would say this piece of marketing may have made the difference between a $20M opening weekend and a less than $10M . . . for a piece of content that maybe cost $100-$200K to make (maximum).
We should be thinking about consumer "journey's", "brand stories" and the best distribution of those (paid or earned), not about "native" or "advertising".