The UK digital media industry is keeping an in depth eye on moves to counter potential industry regulation on how brands and publishers distinguish native ad formats from editorial content within the US. This comes because the emerging ad types are tipped to become the foremost widely-used online format within a dozen years.
The IAB’s US entity has install a local Advertising Task Force including 80 companies representing advertisers, media owners and technology providers, to agree upon best practice around ‘blending’ commercial messaging with editorial content – ‘native advertising’ or ‘sponsored content’.
The Native Advertising Task Force, whose leadership includes representatives from the IAB itself, Sharethrough and Yahoo, is preparing to publish a “prospectus” proposing how best to attain a consistent mixture of both different pieces of content, in this coming quarter.
This move towards self-regulation includes debating the content-type, context and format of the ad units. It also comes because the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) prepares to host a workshop to “examine” the practice of those ads more closely resembling editorial content.
In particular, the workshop, scheduled to appear on 4 December, will deal with which entity controls how native ads are presented to consumers, how they are often differentiated from regular content and consumers’ ability to delineate between the 2.
IAB UK is taking a detailed lead from its US counterpart on developments there, with a up to date poll of IAB UK members showing over half (52 per cent) of respondents saying they ‘know what native advertising is, but needed more information’ on it.
Meanwhile, the survey also revealed that 20 per cent of respondents described themselves as ‘experts’ on native advertising, while a different 12 per cent conceded they had ‘never heard of it’.
Lee Baker, chief marketing strategist at online ad firm Respond and ex-AOP managing director, says that while it’s still be a little “premature” to “standardise” native advertising, or branded content, more consensus a few of the different stakeholders inside the web advertising industry needed.
He says: “I don’t think native advertising is being bought by an analogous team from agency to agency.
“We don’t need standards without delay but what we do need is to be speaking an identical language.”
Web giant AOL, whose Huffington Post Media Group owns editorial brands including Engadget, Huffington Post and Techcrunch, forecasts that 40 per cent of its online revenues will come from native ads next year, and additional predicts such ad formats will surpass ‘traditional online ad formats’ by 2025.
An in-depth study the state of native advertising may be read here.
Native advertising formats:
Native content is a digital advertising method where the advertiser attempts to realize attention by providing content inside the context of editorial content, matching both the shape and serve as of our environment by which it truly is placed.
This content can take the shape of promoted videos, images, articles, music and other media and examples might include promoted tweets, promoted stories on Facebook, promoted posts on Tumblr or sponsored ‘listicles’ (’top 20’-style articles) on BuzzFeed or The Huffington Post.
Native advertising rules:
In the united kingdom, section 2 of the ASA’s Cap Code deals with the popularity of promoting communications and these rules apply whatever the targeting or medium.
Marketing communications should be obviously identifiable as such on all platforms. While context driven content will not be an issue, cloaking advertisements as editorial is.
The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 (CPRs) specifically prohibits “using editorial content within the media to advertise a product where a trader has paid for the promotion without making that clear within the content, images or sounds clearly identifiable by the buyer.”