Native Advertising - How to stay up to date in 2018 (4)
Hey everyone,
I've found that it is not always easy to chose the right channels in order to stay informed about a given topic.
The risk of getting lost in blogs to read, newsletters, and daily emerging online influencers to follow is big, and you end up not getting the information you are lookin for.
So where do you guys get your news about what is going and new trends on Natives and digital marketing in general (other than STM of course 
)?
Influencers you follow? Blogs? News letters you are subscribed to?
My advice is to go out in the wild and see what the competition is doing. There are so many layers of information you can extract from just from seeing a single ad in the wild. You have their creative, you have their widget, you have their landing page, and entire offer. You can use tools to see how long the ad has been in existence and from that calculate the effectiveness/profitability of the ad. Go through the funnel yourself and see what they are doing. I am not a fan of masterminds; the real marketers are out there doing the marketing, not selling or coordinating classes talking about it. Just my 2 cents.
Actually I meant more staying updated at a higher level than simply what adds are running.
Like new strategies, new ad formats, technical improvements, predictions for the future etc.
I tend to agree with chipisti here however I'd say that, broadly speaking, the nativity scene has devolved into a very standardized bottom-block sort of creature with little to no immediate connection to the original concept of native advertising. Partly due to convenience and necessary uniformity in embedded widgetry on the side of publisher networks and SSPs but mostly due to the natural tendency of convergence and mimicry in the tech-slash-monetizing industry. This calls for different strategies as you say but within a very limited scope. The main tip I can advise is to aim for persona-based content promulgation - i.e. get a higher level content in terms of "not being easy to read" and you'll get a corresponding level of education & socio-economic sign up - promote a "for dummies" type content and you'll get a much more broad set of demographics which you can then couple with audience-based (1st party and 3rd party) filters.
Other than that, just follow your basic set of inner morals. For example, stock images might be cheap but having a good designer work around your content can really boost performance. 95% of what's out there is complete trash and it makes for trash leads on the cheap. Depending on your employment situation, I would advise that you either work closely with the content writers or even write your own ads to go with your targeting scheme and the client's audience in mind.
I would argue that anything marketing people touch is ultimately going to deteriorate since the pareto distribution of "giving a shi-" follows the same rules as anything else.
That and stricter regulation handed out unequally based on monthly revenue from a particular advertiser to the platform company. We'll see more human-based (outsourced on the cheap again to student-type positions) content approvals like FB was pressured into with its "fake-news" feed.
In terms of technical improvements, I am hoping for better API and programmatic features which are particularly lacking in the content / native ads industry which at its current proliferation and usability more akin to the old text link mavericks which overnight became outdated after basically doing the same for a decade.
Lastly strategies:
1) Content- Write for the persona you are going for
2) Data- Segment, scope out, segment
3) Image- Think album sleeve not stock image jpeg
4) Title- Keep the continuity and avoid stupid teasers chances are somebody is interested in what you have to tell them
5) Tools- Unsurprisingly the market is huge but only 2-3 monopolized sources and the rest are reselling on arbitrage. Look for the lesser-globalist platforms where possible (e.g. Dianomi vs Outbrain has better yield in some locales).
6) If you're doing social content you either have to go TRUMP in short bursts or you have to go for value and chronological continuity. Stop sending out bit.ly links and hoping for the best!
7) Dare to be better than the rest of the "live ads" out there - most chances are there was little to no thought involved in the creation of the ad funnel you'll run into. Simply because most native ad efforts do not require much effort to produce a sign up or a visit, comparatively speaking, but that's a huge mistake.
8) Please stop doing "10-best-of listicles". Please stop. Please.
Hugs,
~Me
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