Sunday, May 12, 2013

The hustling of "native advertising"; new Hearst digital chief says it's a "natural evolution"

Occasionally, I find myself saying "what the heck does that mean?" and one of those times just occurred when reading an interview in Ad Age with Troy Young, the president at Hearst Magazines Digital Media* saying this about so-called 'native advertising':
There's a lot to come on the native side, and I'm glad the market is rallying around the idea, but really it's a natural evolution of doing a couple of things: Making the advertising fit more elegantly in the content experience, and making it more interesting and removing the friction from consuming it, which was always the problem with legacy advertising experience.

Now it's about putting something back in for the user. Give them value or you're dead. It's a natural evolution. I think it's all good and every publishing company is going to have to deal with it.
Native advertising is apparently seen as a natural evolution of a thing rather than the mere application of a rebranding gloss to something that has long been with us; advertorial, or advertising that masquerades as editorial content. Apparently, too, there was perceived to be a friction present when reading advertising in traditional formats (say, in the pages of a Hearst magazine), now to be lubricated away by making advertising more interesting and integrating it more seamlessly with editorial content. This new, elegant and apparently, better kind of advertising (also contains lanolin) will give readers more value, by the mere act of making ads look more like editorial.

[*Another thing I found out when reading the interview was the Young got his start  in the '90s at Montreal Mirror.] 

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