• by Philip Rosenstein , Staff Writer, October 13, 2016

The explosion of digital advertising over the past years has caused huge problems of waste, fraud and general disengagement from traditional banner and video advertising. Native advertising has become the new standard in digital advertising for brands that want to improve the overall ad experience for potential customers, according to Antti Pasila, founder and CEO of Kiosked.

Native advertising was in part born out of the need to re-engage the user, helping to bring back staying power to digital ads.

“People have already been banner-blind for 10 years,” Pasila told Real-Time Daily. “If you look at the heat maps of eye tracking studies, the actual areas that users are glancing at are getting smaller and smaller. Rarely will people read an entire piece of content.”

Companies like Kiosked have been developing new placements on a page beyond the typical banner, skyscraper or pre-roll advertising that we are all too accustomed to seeing.

“An important distinction in native advertising is the difference between native placement and native creative strategy,” explained Pasila. “A native placement ensures a higher likelihood that a user will engage with an ad, whatever that ad may be, because it feels embedded in an appropriate way with the content being presented.

“A native creative strategy gets closer to what we might think of as a fashion magazine. The ads almost become part of the content, or part of the reason why someone is actually engaging with that piece of content.”

In the digital sphere, examples abound in sports, fashion or travel, where brands can advertise natively while providing a robust and engaging content experience. These types of ads can overlap with the definition of sponsored content.

Pasila claims that native ad placements can at times lift average viewability by 50%-100%, and click-through rates are three to five times higher. “If the experience is better for the users, they will engage more.” The challenge comes in understanding where the user is and what types of creative appeal most.