Wake Up To Native Ads, Indian Brands! It’s Time To ‘Sit And Talk’ Instead Of ‘Scream And Sell’

While India was witnessing a leadership change following the recently held Lok Sabha elections, some new terms emerged in the lingo people were using online and in real life conversations. One of them was ‘paid news’ or ‘paid journalism.’ And the moment you hear these terms, negative sentiments tend to overpower you.

In the course of events, publishers and media houses, accused of promoting such news, suffered huge disrepute. But to be fair to them, not all accusations were true, especially when you notice that the accusations of ‘biased reporting’ were mostly pouring in from one side of the political spectrum. The silver lining to this, if one really looks for it, is that it introduced the Indians to some ‘alien’ concepts. ‘Paid journalism’ is a thing; in fact, most journalism is paid for. Magazines, newspapers and media houses all over the world have their own biases and with those biases, they also build their own brand image.

The next question is – isn’t that what PR is all about? Not necessarily. PR pieces or Press releases are sourced from the point of view of the brand or the product. What I’m talking about right here is reporting or content that is derived from the perspective of the consumer – what engages him, what he’s passionate about and what his experiences tell him. This is what they call native advertising.

By definition, any insertion of a brand message in any form of content within any medium, done in such a way so that it blends with or fits in the user experience, is native advertising. It could be a video on a site, an online or printed article or even a simple tweet where the brand message seamlessly fits into the existing context.

For example, when Germany beat Brazil 7-1 in the FIFA World Cup semi-final, the social media was abuzz with people expressing their reactions and Red Bull (@redbull) tweeted, “Somebody give #BRA some wings! #justforkicks.” This was a perfect, although a little nasty (if you’re a Brazil fan) example of native advertising where the energy drink managed to insinuate its brand message (Red Bull gives you wings) into a world event with heavy user activity on social media. Within minutes, it had 520 retweets and 360 favourites.

Native advertising in India
The crux of native advertising is that it is deeply rooted in content. Indian advertisers are familiar with the concept of content marketing, but not many of them have really exploited the potential it offers. To fully explore the world of native ads and content marketing, brands need to operate across different media with large scale operations. However, that will require some time, resources and a good creative team. Going to agencies or publishers for this purpose is one option. But in case these traditional agencies have not upgraded their tools for generating native content or if they do not understand that native ads are the weapons you must unleash to gain consumer trust, the brand itself has to handle it. And that’s not what most Indian brands specialise in.

So what should Indian brands do?
First, they need to understand that the era of banner ads is over. The ‘projecting income from click-through-rates (CTR)’ mentality must go now. In an age when Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc., are the key hubs of online social activity, brands need to understand how to leverage the unique potential each of these platforms offers.

Take BuzzFeed, for instance. A Spotify-based post titled 20 Things That Affirm Led Zeppelin Is The Greatest Band To Ever Exist was shared over 8,530 times on Facebook. With likes and comments, the total number of Facebook interactions that the post generated came up to 49,700. Another post from the brand publisher GE and titled 20 Ways To Know You’re A Creative was shared 524 times on LinkedIn. This is how Indian brands need to operate. Once they know their crowd, brands need to come up with unique content that says, “I’m telling you something interesting,” instead of “I’m selling you something.”

There is a wide gap between banner ads and PR-based Press releases. So it is high time Indian brands understand how native advertising can fill that gap.
Image courtesy: United Nations