There are millions of ways to reach potential customers, but your potential customers are bombarded by millions of messages. The trick is putting the right information in the right place at the right time.
Note: The three examples below were posted on social media. I've also written a few articles for consumer-facing magazines (print), many articles for customer-facing newsletters (print and online), and hundreds of customer-facing marketing pieces and news articles (online).
With Instagram it's about the photo, though you can add text. With Twitter it's about the really tight text, though you can add a photo.
instagram post - click to see a larger version
twitter post
The article below was posted on LinkedIn
Did You Spot the Groundbreaking Ad on the Cover of Forbes?
Subtle or glaring, native content is big business. Should it be?
Like it or not, it’s everywhere. Native content discretely blends products, photos, and/or text into the format of the platform where it appears, and that means it can be hard to peg as paid advertising.
Native content you’ve probably noticed:
- Pop-up ads next to your search results.
- Promoted tweets on Twitter.
- All those GM cars in the Transformers movie series.
Native content you may not have pegged:
- Celebrities posting Instagram photos with casually but carefully placed product.
The New York Times articles like “Women Inmates: Why the Male Model Doesn’t Work,” with its brief mention of the TV series “Orange is the New Black.” (A sentence at the end of the article reads, “This page was produced by the T Brand Studio, a unit of the advertising department of The New York Times, in collaboration with Netflix.”)
- A small infographic on the cover – yes, the cover! – of the March 2, 2015 issue of Forbes that points to more native content inside. Can you find it on the photo at the end of this article? (According to Advertising Age the giveaway is the term “FidelityVoice,” if you happen to know Forbes marks its native content by combining the advertiser's name with the word “voice.”)
About the Forbes cover ad, Content Daily reasons, “It’s easy to smirk and scoff at the blasphemy. But with cost estimates … at well over a million dollars, Forbes is definitely having the last laugh.”
As for articles that read more like an editorial than an ad, a study released by The New York Times says their “T Brand Studio-produced content generated 361% more unique visitors and 526% more time spent than advertiser-produced content.” This study (or is the study itself an advertisement?) clearly suggests that it takes big bucks to make big bucks.
Does it always? As a consumer following local businesses that tweet home-grown ads, I’ve come to appreciate:
- Learning about things I wouldn’t otherwise, like new arrivals and closeout sales.
- Knowing that this no-cost advertising is helping to keep prices down.
- Trusting straightforward advertisements that don’t pretend to be something else.
But as the daughter of an ad man, I also know:
- Good ads can provide interesting and well-researched information I might not find anywhere else.
- Great ads are entertaining as well as informative.
- All ads are created by people, and many of those people have families to support.
Even when I’m cursing the person who generated native content that’s so subtle I didn’t catch on right away, part of me is admiring the fact that they can. Just like part of me is enjoying the challenge of spotting it.
Besides, close to $200 billion is spent on advertising in the U.S. each year. Our economy can use that kind of help.
So as long as small-business owners can still find ways to reach me, I’m okay with the big advertising industry, and their native content too.
Bring it on.
