Dubai: As more consumers turn to ad-blockers, or become more adept at skipping over panel advertising and less inclined to return to sites that force pop-ups upon them, Rami Sa’ad believes it’s time agencies focus on native advertising.
But for native adverts — also known as sponsored content, advertising features or advertorials — to work, they have to be done properly, said Sa’ad, deputy chief operating officer of Dubai agency Digital Media Services.
That, he says, means they must be engaging, offer high-quality content to consumers, and they must be clearly labelled as sponsored content.
On the sidelines of the Arabnet Digital Forum at Madinat Jumeriah, where he was a panellist last week, Sa’ad said, “I believe that the voice of the publisher is something that we sometimes, as an industry, underestimate and don’t give enough thought to.
“Publishers are brands. Those brands, some of them have been around for decades, so they have an image. In exactly the same way that a brand evaluates its equity, that publisher has equity whether they understand it or not. They have equity with consumers.”
Sa’ad said advertisers need to immediately come up with solutions that very clearly label stories that are actually advertising or sponsored content.
“We’re risking a diminishing trust between the consumer and the publisher, which is much, much worse than having a relationship be broken between a brand and a consumer.
“If you don’t trust The Economist any more, what does The Economist lose? That’s where the problem lies. If you don’t trust the news that we provide you, then I’ve not only ruined my advertising business, I’ve ruined the entire relationship that I have with that consumer,” he said.
Sa’ad say that if the relationships with consumers are damaged, advertisers will find it very hard to recruit them on social platforms.
“In actual monetary value it will become more expensive for that publisher to generate a following across social platforms. People will not trust me and therefore not value my opinions, and obviously I’ll have a diminishing revenue around native ads because very directly and immediately the CTR [click-through rates] and the engagement rates will drop.”
Sa’ad said he believed publishers who did not label sponsored content were going after short-term gains, but such a strategy was damaging in the long term.
“I can make a lot more money if I remove all of these guidelines, but I know that what will happen next is something that the publisher will not enjoy.”
Sa’ad’s views are echoed by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which requires native advertising be labelled as such.
But even that may not be enough. Research published in the journal Technology Science in December suggests native advertising and other forms of adverts disguised as editorial content, even labelled as such, gulled 27 per cent of a sample of 598 readers into thinking they were written by a reporter or editor.
“We find that labelling — even using a ‘sponsored content’ disclosure is insufficient to disabuse a significant minority of consumers about the provenance of the advertising material,” noted researchers Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Eduard Meleshinsky, though they pointed out that their data, based on people who appear on behavioural tracking marketing lists, may not be suitable for a generalisation.
Nevertheless, Hoofnagle, a professor at Berkeley’s School of Information, and Meleshinsky, an associate attorney at civil rights employment law firm Bryan Schwartz Law, are in favour of bolstering the FTC requirements significantly, with options ranging from increasing disclosure requirements or putting the burden on publishers to demonstrate content is not misleading to a complete ban on native advertising.
While he supported native advertising, Sa’ad was scathing about the impact of more insidious forms of stealth marketing on digital channels, such as using hidden links and other shady practices to improve search engine rankings or click rates. He called it fraud.
“Fraud is an area that’s very, very important to tackle. I read an article that talked about the losses from fraud for the ad business of between $6 billion and $7 billion [Dh22.03 billion and Dh25.71 billion] globally last year. That’s a very big number. Imagine that money going to publishers like you and me and many other publishers around the world. We would be in much better shape. We would be able to create or run many more programmes than we do today for consumers. The consumer will win in the end,” he said.
“But digital relies on tech and tech is a business where there are a lot of hidden doors and secrets and so on. What we do at DMS is we continuously monitor fraud traffic. It’s a typical best practice when you look at global standards to ensure that we are always in the clear zone on fraudulent traffic.”
Some of the practices he highlighted as fraudulent included having software agents — bots — generate clicks or views on adverts, click farming and multiple overlays of adverts on a website.
“There are many different practices that are malicious in this industry because there’s money in it, and wherever there is money that’s capturable without putting too much effort in, people will go for these shortcuts, unfortunately, and try and eat a piece of the pie.”
