With only so many forms of online advertising available, concerns about their effectiveness are often brought up by both clients and internal marketing teams. Traditional tools like banners, pop-ups and pre-rolls are beginning to seem old-fashioned and are rapidly diminishing in effectiveness – click-through rates on banner ads have fallen from 9% in 2000 to just 0.2% as of 2012. The question that needs answering now is: how can content providers integrate advertising into their websites without compromising visitor experience?

Enter native advertising.

Native ad experiences differ from traditional web-based ad formats because they are integrated with the visual design of a publisher’s site and are choice-based, meaning that they do not rely on interruptive or distracting mechanisms to force a user’s attention. Brands advertise in the same format as the non-commercial content on the site. Common examples of this “advertorial online content” include: paid tweets on Twitter, sponsored stories on Facebook, branded playlists and stations on Spotify and Pandora, and promoted pages on Pinterest, StumbleUpon or Tumblr.

This advertising method has been buzzing on the web in 2012 and seems poised to jump into many a marketer’s plans in 2013. According to a survey of 800 media buyers, agency creatives and publishers released this week, almost half (49%) of media buyers will buy these content-based ad vehicles in the coming year, with 40% of them saying that they will devote 10% or more of clients’ budgets to native advertising.

Looking to expand into new, innovative advertising opportunities? ARTÉMIA can help.