Developing a Typology of Native Advertising: An Abstract

Abstract

The Pew Research Center (2017) states that digital advertising operations continue to grow as legacy print news organizations expand their digital presence online. A development that has allowed legacy news organizations to diversify their revenue stream is native advertising. Native advertising is the practice of developing advertisements that appear similar to editorial content (Howe and Teufel 2014; American Press Institute 2013). The development of native advertising is interesting since the common practice in print news outlets has traditionally been to separate editorial content from advertising (Soley and Craig 1992). However, advertisers believe that this new approach to sponsored media content boosts ad revenue and builds consumer loyalty—without compromising the editorial quality and integrity of a publication (Pew 2017). In fact, it is suggested that native digital ad spending in the USA will increase significantly in the next few years (Fast Company 2017; eMarketer 2017). Therefore, the adoption among various news outlets has been strong in recent years, and the researchers expect to find a plethora of native ads in news outlets. Yet our understanding of the production characteristics of these advertisements is limited. Therefore, it is argued that a typology of native advertisements is necessary to understand the impact native advertisements have on consumers. To gain an understanding, this study will adopt a framework utilized by Hernandez and Rue (2016) that has been used to classify digital news packages. The framework is shaped as a triangle, at the top corner is the continuous category, the left corner is comprehensive category, and finally at the right corner is the immersive category. Continuous refers to use of traditional narrative format that is linear in format, comprehensive refers to a layout that contains multiple elements besides pure narrative to tell the story, and the immersive category is defined as an engaging environment where the reader is encouraged to explore by use of several tools. It is the hope that developing a typology that explores the distinguishing characteristics among various examples of native advertisements will offer a fresh perspective that researchers can use to reinvestigate questions of relevancy, quality, and transparency among native ads. Overall, practitioners would be better prepared to understand this new revenue model and able to participate in the development and the evaluation of newly created native advertisements.