Native advertising
Contemporary formats for native advertising now include promoted videos, images, articles, commentary, music, and other various forms of media.
A majority of these methods for delivering the native strategy have been relegated to an online presence, where it is most commonly employed as publisher-produced brand content, a similar concept to the traditional advertorial.
The production of sponsored content (sometimes abbreviated as "sponcon"[14]) involves inclusion of a third party along with a management company or a brand company's personal relations and promotional activities team in reaching out to aforementioned considerably popular third party content producers on social media, often independent, deemed "influencers" in an attempt to promote a product.
Often quoted as the predecessor to traditional endorsed and/or contract advertising; which would instead be featuring celebrities, sponsored content has indubitably become more and more popular on social media platforms in recent years likely due to their cost-effectiveness, time efficiency, as well as the ability to receive instant feedback on the marketability of a product or service.
[citation needed] A technique often used in traditional sponsored advertising is direct and indirect product placement (embedded marketing).
[citation needed] Unlike traditional forms of native advertising, sponsored content alludes to requirement of and desire for transparency and thrives on the concept of preexisting and/or built up trust between consumer and content producer rather than creating a masked net impression, which is a reasonable consumer's understanding of an advertisement.
The sponsored content on social media, like any other type of native advertising, can be difficult to be properly identified by the Federal Trade Commission because of its ambiguous nature.
Notable companies involved in this trade include fit-tea, sugar bear hair and various diet meal planning services and watch brands.
[19] As it is the nature of disguised advertising to blend with its surroundings, a clear disclosure is deemed necessary when employing native marketing strategy in order to protect the consumer from being deceived, and to assist audiences in distinguishing between sponsored and regular content.
[21] These can vary drastically due to the publisher's choice of disclosure language (i.e., wording used to identify native advertising placement).
[23] The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) released updated guidelines in 2015 reaffirming the need of publishers to distinguish editorial and advertising content.
The ASME approach recommends both labels to disclose commercial sponsorship and in-content visual evidence to help the user distinguish native advertising from editorial.
In the study, 27% of respondents thought that journalists or editors wrote an advertorial for diet pills, despite the presence of the "Sponsored Content" label.
Popular examples include Promoted Tweets on Twitter, Sponsored Stories on Facebook, and TrueView Video Ads on YouTube.
