“Get it Online" speaker explains importance of native advertising

Jeffrey Turner, Huffington Post’s senior director, head of ad product and monetization, explained at a "Get It Online" event Oct. 13 why native advertising, which looks like the content of the media where it appear – a news article in a newspaper, for example - has become a critically important ingredient of more and more advertising investments.

Turner, whose role has recently expanded to include TechCrunch and gadget, encouraged the “Get it Online” audience to rethink the role of native in their mix of advertising products

The ad world is “becoming polarized” as technology makes it easier to automate more traditional forms of digital advertising and as branded content and native rise in importance, he said.

He listed the reasons for native advertising’s growth as:

1. ad blocking (largely the result of wars between Google, Facebook and Apple),


2. the increasing importance of smartphone load time (which can be diminished by ad serving technologies),


3. the growth of programmatic or automated ad buys based on audience segments,


4. greater performance from native advertising formats,


5. marketer desires for two-way communications with brands and


6. the growth of the Internet of Things, which increases the variety of Internet-enabled devices.

Traditional ads generate click through rates of less than a tenth of a percent compared to a national benchmark of about a fourth of a percent for native and an impressive half percent or more for Huffington Post native ads, he said

According to Turner, these performance gains are magnified when mobile and app native advertising is broken out from the desktop. Mobile performance is about twice the desktop and app performance is about four times as large.

“Custom content drives results,” Turner concluded. He also advocates high-quality native ad content, and noted concerns about the effect that misleading or poorly produced content can have on the overall progress of the native ad format.

Turner also discussed the challenges all publishers face as revenue creation continues to move to platforms like Facebook and ways that publishers can consider partnering to maintain some ability to retain revenue by leveraging their good journalism.