Create Account
With the world grappling with the coronavirus pandemic and more and more people being confined to their homes, today’s customer experience is more important than ever.
As online audiences stay glued to their device screens in search of answers and distractions, the digital ads they encounter will play a big role in their decision-making process, making the customer experience important. In fact, 84% of people say experiences are just as important (if not more so) than a company’s products.
Modern consumers have placed a premium on compelling brand stories told through seamless digital ads, which is precisely what native formats are designed to do. Native ads match the form of the content next to where they appear. Placed within trusted editorial content or environment, these highly-targeted native ads can drive powerful results.
Why Go Native? Because Context is Power
Here at Genius Monkey, we’ve always promoted the power of native advertising. In fact, native is automatically built into our campaigns, so everything you are about to read in this article is something fully-included with all Genius Monkey ad plans (some of which you’d have to pay a premium for with other ad servers).
The world changes fast, which means advertising must change fast too. And one of the biggest “booms” in digital marketing over the past few years has been mobile advertising. Mobile has redefined the digital experience, making it better than ever before. In turn people expect more. They gravitate toward brands and experiences that are helpful at the moment and that meet expectations across the customer journey. Because of this, brands choose to go native for three primary reasons:
- Contextual formats place ads strategically on trusted websites such as Yahoo, TechCrunch, CNN, and many others.
- Adaptable formats achieve brand goals with dynamic image ads and full-screen video across devices.
- Intent-driven data finds the right contexts and moments using intent signals from users each month.
Most people think of native advertising for bottom-of-the-funnel goals, but the true power of native is its ability to help your brand tell better stories to reach awareness and consideration goals, too.
Brand Storytelling through Native Formats
To really understand the value native offers we need to not only look at the format but also what the ad can do, and how it resonates. Engaging ad formats can even produce 35% greater engagement with carousel ads vs. single-image ads, and ROAS can increase more than 6x when using native video along with pre-roll.
Native ads can take many forms, from sponsored articles and videos to in-feed posts to search results. Here are a few new ways to use native ads as a brand canvas to help you develop more powerful experiences for your customers at all stages of the journey.
- Extend your reach: Have you already developed video and creative assets for a TV campaign? Repurpose them for native video formats and extend your story to the smaller screen. Trusted content environments can help brands achieve much more exposure and over over 150% more brand awareness.
- Promote branded content: A native canvas is a perfect opportunity to deliver more upper-funnel distribution of your branded content. Strong, first-party data can also improve targeting across native, driving greater awareness and new customer acquisition.
- Improve engagement: Interactive storytelling with native formats is a proven way to get your audience to stop in their digital scrolling tracks and engage with your message. Innovative formats such as carousel ads encourage users to swipe through multiple images at a time, holding their attention for 70% longer than static imagery. By viewing just 2-3 cards in an interactive format, mobile users engage with ads at a 30% higher rate and drive 60% lift in unaided brand awareness.
The Power of Native Programmatic
Native is one of the most powerful forces in digital advertising today. It performs spectacularly for publishers and advertisers alike, and consumers prefer it to “traditional” ad units. By bringing the targeting, reach, and optimization powers of programmatic platforms like Genius Monkey to native advertising, brands and marketers can take advantage of the most powerful tools available, and make their campaigns a resounding success.
And at Genius Monkey, with native being automatically built into our standard display campaigns, our clients are already set up for success. With the integration of native, marketers can get even more value from each impression and brands can create more compelling stories.
No matter what your campaign goals are, native ad formats can become a powerful brand canvas that offers potential returns across the entire customer journey. Start telling better, more compelling brand stories today with native.
