Earlier this week following Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr they announced that they would begin integrating native ads ” sponsored content” into news streams. This type of advertising fits naturally on sites where people can post anything. Think Twitter, Facebook, and now Tumblr, Flickr. It’s a great opportunity for brands, but the content needs to be much more than a banner. This is especially true if a brand is sponsoring content to appear in newsfeeds of people who aren’t already following them. So here are some of my thoughts on native advertising.
- The content should be unique “think beautiful images captured with a Nikon camera” versus the traditional yellow banner ad
- The content should fit the crowd, if animated gifs are popular on Tumblr then explore that opportunity with unique cinemagraph images
- Offer something of value, a free app download or Tumblr only clips from an upcoming episode or book sample
- Ask for user content as part of a contest or sweepstakes, share examples
- Take advantage of the excellent targeting tools these sites offer
We also see these native ads to be ideal for mobile advertising as they are generally appearing in stream versus small banners. These in stream ads have done well on Facebook to date and boosted mobile revenues significantly.