
Tanvi Kapoor
Rome wasn’t built in a day. It took Romans years of vision and hard work to create a cultural heritage that delights people to this day. Native Advertising is like Rome. At the beginning, some marketers had the vision to create unobtrusive ads which fit into the app layout instead of standing out like a band-aid. As Native Advertising enjoys global adoption, it is imperative to refine the vision for native ads and create ad units that are better than their predecessors in experience and efficacy.
With this objective in mind, a small working group in the IAB Task Force on Content Marketing and Native Advertising, comprised of InMobi, ShareThrough, Yahoo and the IAB, set out to do a deep-dive on the most popular native ad unit, in-feed ads. The ultimate goal is to help refine the scope of the in-feed ad unit to fit into the publisher’s environment while maximizing the advertiser’s goals. After weeks of collaboration, we have come up with the following guidelines:
As native advertising evolves, we are bound to see new in-feed types emerge which can’t clearly be classified in any of the existing buckets. Like Rome, Native Advertising will take time to evolve to fulfill the vision of seamless advertising -ads which are so cohesive with the page content, assimilated into the design, and consistent with the platform behavior that the viewer simply feels that they belong.
You can read the Deep Dive Document here.
This document was prepared by a working group within the IAB’s Content Marketing and Native Advertising Task Force groups which was led by Tanvi Kapoor and Kayla Wilson from InMobi along with committee co-chairs Dan Greenberg from Sharethrough and Graham Harris from Yahoo. Susan Borst, Director of Industry Initiatives, was the IAB lead. All members of the IAB Content Marketing and Native Advertising Task Force groups* had the opportunity to comment on the final draft.
Register to our blog updates newsletter to receive the latest content in your inbox.