Since its inception in 2013, the Native Advertising Task Force, along with its sister Content Marketing Task Force, have worked together to produce significant market-making documents. This recaps the key 2015 task force activity.
IAB In-Feed Deep Dive, a Supplement to the IAB Native Advertising Playbook (July, 2015)
The Native Advertising Playbook, published in December, 2013, continues to this day to be the most quoted piece on native advertising. The Task Force has been busy preparing deep dive documents into the various types of native ad formats to provide more industry guidance. This year, the IAB Deep Dive on In-Feed Ad Units was released*. The In-Feed Deep Dive received coverage in TechCrunch, MSN News, Mobile Advertising Watch, Marketing Dive, and more.
*IAB acknowledges the Native Advertising In-Feed Deep Dive working group members from AdsNative, Bidtellect, Bloomberg, Demand Media, Disney Interactive, Disqus, GumGum, InMobi, Meredith Digital, Mixpo, my6sense, Nativo, OneSpot, Polar, PowerLinks Media, PubMatic, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Selectable Media, Sharethrough, The Daily News, Time Inc., TripleLift, Tumblr and Yahoo, plus the many IAB members of the Native Advertising Task Force who provided thought leadership leading to the final document.
Two other working groups have been formed to prepare deep dives on two other types of native ad formats: Promoted Listings (aka Product Ads) and Recommendation Widgets. These documents will be published early next year.
Disclosure, Disclosed. How Leading Web Properties Disclose In-Feed Ads (August, 2015)
The topic of disclosure continues to remain of paramount importance. The original Playbook contained the following Recommended Disclosure Principles:
While the principles have not changed, we sought to better understand what cues web publishers were actually providing to help consumers distinguish between the paid ad and the surrounding editorial content before they clicked to the destination site or page. We* focused exclusively on the in-feed ad format for ComScore Top 100 publishers that had in-feed ads on desktop and evaluated language used, placement and other visual cues.
We were encouraged to see that these publishers appear to be paying attention to helping consumers understand when they are viewing in-feed ads, using language and other visual disclosure cues to distinguish between surrounding publisher editorial content. The findings are summarized in the infographic.
* IAB acknowledges Brandtale who aggregated the data to determine if in-feed advertising was present on a site and also prepared the infographic.
Additionally, the Native Task Force partnered with the IAB B2B Committee for Town Hall held at the IAB AdLab in June. Over 220 members registered for the event to hear topics ranging from benchmarks, programmatic, use of DMPs and more. We are thankful to all speakers from the companies listed below.
Looking forward to 2016, we are happy to announce that the Native Advertising and Content Marketing task force groups will be merged into one Native Advertising/Content Committee reflective of the importance of these topics. With this change will come new co-chairs to be announced before the end of the year. We would be remiss if we did not extend our sincere gratitude to the outgoing co-chairs of the task force groups who were instrumental in providing strategic direction, thought leadership and time to help develop numerous important market making industry pieces:
Content Marketing Outgoing Co-chairs: Lisa LaCour/Outbrain, Chris Schraft/Time Inc. and Andrew Susman/StudioOne
Native Advertising Outgoing Co-chairs: Dan Greenberg/Sharethrough and Graham Harris/Yahoo
Beyond the Recommendation Widget and Promoted Listing Deep-Dives, much of the focus on Native/Content will be in conjunction with the IAB TechLab on the topics of OpenRTB 2.3 (native) and Dynamic Content Ads working group output. We will also continue the drum beat on the importance of disclosure. A meeting in 1Q 2016 will set our agenda for the remainder of the year.
If you are interested in learning more about the Native Advertising/Content group, please contact Susan Borst ([email protected]).
