As advertising continues to be a driving factor for successful media publishing, readers on mobile must be met with ads in a careful way as to not interrupt their activity and aim to provide further entertainment. Although native ads are expensive, strong preliminary results suggest it is becoming a more established choice for brands. 

?Native advertising is evolving from the experimental to the established phase,? said Mark Cluett, marketing manager at Polar, Toronto. ?Though native advertising and sponsored content has existed in some form way beyond the past year, we?ve seen media companies make a push that concentrates not only on content, but packaging their insights and expertise in a comprehensive program which exists outside their editorial department.?

The aforementioned publishers are all dedicated sponsored content programs, separate from editorial teams, which were born from client demand for campaigns coupled with the promotional expertise and media insight of the publishers that started them.

From aggregate data collected though MediaVoice, publishers are seeing elevated click-through-rates and engagement with native ads compared to display.

CTR is above average for all placements but is best for tablets. They boast a .25 percent CTR, followed by mobile at .23 percent CTR and desktop at .11 percent CTR.

Broken down by verticals, CTR does especially well in B2B publications. They see a .66 percent CTR on their placements compared to .22 percent CTR in lifestyle and entertainment verticals, and .10 percent CTR in news and finance verticals.

The University of California has tested native advertising on online magazine source Slate.com and has seen a strong response on social media with one story receiving more than 7,000 likes on Facebook.

Through the use of Slate?s internal agency SlateCustom, and native advertising platform Polar?s MediaVoice, the University ran a series called Breakthroughs, which aimed to raise awareness around research conducted on the University system?s various campuses. While native ads have been known to fit conveniently in between editorial content and not cause interruptions for the reader, Slate?s native programs have garnered encouraging results, while some campaigns have seen an average time spent per user of more than 3 minutes and up to five minutes on mobile (see story). 

In 2013, publications such as The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star have also piloted the native advertising program that made it easy to deliver sponsored content across smartphone, tablet and desktop Web sites.

For publishers looking to monetize their mobile sites, native advertising provides a way to deliver ads that are integrated into the user experience. These publications tested a variety of types of native ads on Polar?s MediaVoice platform, including sponsored stories, sponsored videos, sponsored photo galleries and sponsored outbound content (see story).

These efforts are sure to continue to develop, as native ads serve as less of a disruption for readers.

?The next stage is scale, keeping up with demand, and the questions which come with it,? Mr. Cluett said. ?Simply stating peripheral engagement numbers won?t be enough as clients and brands start to introduce more intricate native advertising. 

?A publisher can?t just simply execute a native advertising campaign and think that?s it. With such and investment of resources, clients will want advanced metrics and analytics, showing how readers interacted with and shared their content and more.?