It’s been six years since the conference keynote at which technology investor Fred Wilson is credited with having coined the term “native advertising.” It is apposite that Wilson is a tech specialist and that the conference was about online marketing. After all, for most people, native advertising, while it undoubtedly takes a cue from the sponsored content of yesteryear, is principally a digital play.
Native has certainly grown within digital. Ad spend in the category is forecasted by eMarketer to grow 36.2% through 2017 to reach $22.09 billion, making up the majority of digital display spending for the first time.
But native can also now be about more than just digital. In fact, native advertising is leaping off the page and onto the TV. Specifically, the same cleansing effect that native has brought to the web — helping to present marketing messaging that is as valuable and welcoming as the content against which it is placed — is also now coming to moving pictures.
TV executives, taking a cue from online native and alarmed by growing antipathy toward advertising in the round, are rebalancing ads and content in their programming mix, and everyone will benefit.
You can see it all over:
1. Fewer, Better Ads Mimic Content
CNN, owned by Turner Broadcasting, is one of the several media organizations racing to respond. Across its truTV and TNT channels, it is experimenting with reducing the number of ads aired in its programming.
In exchange for halving the ad load, Turner is offering advertisers fewer, longer slots designed to support deeper, richer mini films of up to two-and-a-half minutes — just the kind of material, in fact, that many marketers are now already shooting as branded content for their own channels.
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by Julien Verdier
source: Forbes