Native Advertising Must Be as Good as Your Editorial Content

What is the secret to good native advertising? What is the biggest challenge for native advertising? What is the future of native advertising?

We ask the world’s leading native advertising specialists in our short form video series #NativeAdSecrets.

Here, Pete Wootton, MD of Digital at Dennis Publishing and speaker at the Native Advertising DAYS 2016, shares his views.

https://youtu.be/43nQCKKKxEo 

Make sure that the work is as good as the normal editorial content, you would produce.

The secret to native advertising is...
I think really making sure that the work is as good as the normal editorial content, you would produce. If it's as good as you would normally produce an editorial product then it will be very successful because consumers will want to read it and that the editorial team will want to promote it -- maybe promote it as well on their own social channels -- and so will your users. So if you get it right it can be very effective.

We need to resist having loads of programmatic native on our premium sites.

The biggest challenge for native advertising is...
I think really just making sure that we don't let it get commoditized. As a premium publisher, it should be one of the ways that we can stand out from a lot of the other suppliers in the market who don't produce premium great quality content. So we need to resist having loads of programmatic native on our premium sites and if we get that right I think that we're all reaping the benefits in the longer term.

It allows publishers like us to get really close to brands.

The future of native advertising is...
I wish I knew...I think it will continue to grow. Clearly, it's a big boom market at the moment, and I think that the exciting thing about it is that it allows publishers like us to get really close to brands, to have a really good relationship with them in it. It stops all these parties that exist in the display market being between us and the client. So if you get that right, I think that's very exciting and I think that's going to continue to happen going forward.

You can learn more from Pete Wootton in this longer interview, where he argues that native advertising has to be done by the editorial team.