Don’t panic: ‘native’ is not the Ebola virus of advertising

Last Week Tonight presenter John Oliver is not a fan of native advertising.

Are publishers really ‘dividing church and state’ by accepting native advertising alongside their editorial? Dominic Mills thinks we all need to relax a bit.

It may be because it is a superb evisceration of native advertising, or it may be because it’s the silly season, but comedian John Oliver’s 11-minute rant on HBO last week about the evils of native advertising has got the chatterati going.

I’ve lost count of the number of people forwarding it to me. The way some people are talking you’d think native was like the Ebola virus.

Just plug it into Google and you can see the acres of comment and hand-wringing, including this from respected commentator Joe Marchese arguing that Oliver is a genius.

All this will be music to the ears of another commentator, Bob Garfield, a one-man Red Cross unit fighting the good fight against the pernicious epidemic that is native advertising.

But as the debate heats up, it’s worth just standing back for a moment.

At this juncture, it seems an appropriate moment to introduce my favourite quote about advertising, from the now-deceased copywriter Howard Gossage, known by some as the Socrates of San Francisco.

He said: “People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.”

Though his quote pre-dates any concept of native advertising, or even its forerunner, the ‘advertorial’, Gossage’s quote seems especially relevant.

Indeed, you could say that the whole BuzzFeed model (I see it now claims to do business with 76% of the 100-largest US advertisers) is inspired by Howard Gossage’s dictum.

People read BuzzFeed because it interests them, and nearly all the time it’s an ad. Judging by the traffic, they don’t feel conned.

Let me apply his test to two random examples from last week’s Stylist magazine, which I happen to have to hand (thanks to a distributor outside Waterloo keen to get rid of her last copy). One is a self-described, clearly labelled, ‘Stylist advertorial’, for some new Adidas women’s trainers. It looked pretty much like an ordinary page of Stylist. But it didn’t interest me, so I passed on it. No harm done, no time wasted.

The second was a ‘Stylist promotion’, also clearly labelled and in the style of the title, for the Ford Fiesta, and running opposite a full-page ad for the car. As it happens, I am in the market for a new car and so, despite the fact that the Stylist copy advised me on how to team up a snazzy little outfit to match the colour of the car, I read it.

You can see more of Ford’s activities with Stylist here.

I read it, in short, because I was interested. Do I feel conned or abused in any way? No. A Ford was not on my long list of marques and models to consider before, but it might be now. So that was reasonably good use of my time.

Do I think that Stylist has sold its soul to the devil or crossed some sacrosanct line, as John Oliver would have it, dividing church and state? Did I feel I had been conned?

No. But if I did, I would take the most immediate action available to me, which would be putting either a) the brand or b) the publisher on my banned list – and possibly both of them.

I have no doubt we will see a lot more. Native is effectively a subset of content, which we all know is growing, while on the supply side publishers are desperate for the revenue and are pushing anything that can command a premium.

So, whatever John Oliver might wish, it isn’t going away. Indeed, there seems to be a group of deluded marketing professionals out there who think it’s going to take over the world.

According to a US study published last month, 22% of marketers believe all digital advertising in future will be native. All? They must be bonkers.

By and large I am quite relaxed about the role of native advertising, but I suspect from this that there is still some confusion out there – deliberately sewn, I’d guess, mostly by those who wish to push, but perhaps also by some who don’t like it – about what it exactly it is.

This piece by Francis Turner of Adyoulike, which both produces native advertising and supplies native-linked technology to brands and publishers, sums up the state of the nation well.

The IAB in the US meanwhile has identified six – yes, six – different types of native advertising, ranging from search to in-feed and recommendation engines of the type run by Outbrain.

Recommendation engines provide the sort of content that lurks at the bottom of a page, encouraging you to delve further: think Amazon’s ‘people who bought this also bought this’, except that they’re flogging native advertising on a CPC basis.

By way of a test, I checked out the recommended content at the bottom of a What Car? Review. It’s mostly clear that it is promotional material but some of it is, to put it mildly, extraordinarily irrelevant – like the advertorial about cloud computing.

So I punished them the best way I know. Not, in this case, by ignoring them, but indulging in a little click mania. I know it’s childish, but the idea that I’ve wasted their time and money pleases me a lot.