Digital advertising is getting harder to spot, and not just because most Internet users have learned to disregard and ignore banner ads and pop-ups.
Intrusive advertising tactics are quickly finding their way to the trash bin of advertising history. And in their place are highly engaging digital ads that you may not even initially recognize as being ads.
“Audiences have become more sophisticated. The era of interruption-based advertising is passing. The promise of native is that it can be engagement-based advertising,” Justin Choi, founder of startup Nativo, said in a recent interview.
It goes without saying that connected people have more information at their disposal than ever today. And that means there’s more junk to weed out. But with the advent of native advertising, sponsored video content, and highly personalized relevant mobile and email marketing resources, it’s actually becoming easier to reach audiences and have your marketing message resonate.
Today, one of the hottest tactics in digital and mobile advertising is finding a way to get into a user’s social or digital news stream. From in-stream ads on Facebook to a native ad placement on a popular blog regularly visited by customers in a targeted audience, digital advertising is evolving dramatically in 2014.
Moving forward, Choi is among those who see nothing but ample opportunity for advertisers eager to find appropriate ways to enter news feeds and the mobile screen in a manner that doesn’t disrupt and adds value to the overall user experience.
“We’re in very early days of native advertising,” Choi admits. “I think it will start to accelerate further in 2015, and then grow even faster in 2016. It will take a couple years to really get the ad content creation ecosystem fully in place and once it is, demand for distribution of that content will explode.”