The world of marketing has discovered a new species, according to the New York Times: “native advertising.” And apparently, the jury is out on whether this species will be invasive, killing the pure, vital storytelling species known as journalism.
As someone who spent two decades in journalism, I have a particularly strong affinity for the field and its storytelling heart. As someone who founded a strategic communications and marketing firm that specializes in uncovering, developing and sharing the great stories of our clients with everyone who needs to see, hear and experience them, I also care a great deal about storytelling in marketing.
To be a storyteller, you have to love words. I’m not in love with the words “native advertising.” Using them to describe the business of making paid advertising look like the editorial content of a publication, website or video news organization doesn’t strike me as “native” at all. To communicate is human, to advertise is to be forgiven, to adapt a phrase I might have heard somewhere.
There’s nothing about advertising that’s native. When advertisers have to start camouflaging the output of a trade that’s all about marching bands, confetti, loud noises and sophomoric sexual humor, well then, that’s a supreme failure of what many of us who practice inbound marketing would call “interruption” marketing.
Aside from whatever journalistic peril it might cause, disguising your advertising to make it look like something else says your advertising doesn’t work. That’s why at WordWrite, our goal is to use out strategic communications expertise as we tell our clients’ important and honet stories.
Why is this even an issue? Because traditional marketing and journalism are in the same predicament: legacy industries struggling to find relevance in a 21st century marketplace where transparency and buyer behavior are fueled by the freedom, metrics and results of that wild and crazy thing called the Internet.
I hesitate to say journalism and advertising need each other. It’s true that the professions lived together for a couple of centuries, advertising dollars fueling editorial content. We also used to drive around this country in buggies pulled by horses, generating enormous quantities of unsafe and unsanitary horse manure. We don’t do that any more, so maybe a bit of similar introspection with regard to the relationship between classic advertising and journalism is prudent.
The sad sideshow called “native advertising” is really a distraction from the main event: strategic marketing has changed for the better in the 21st century. There’s a better way of marketing to people who want or need what you do, in a way that reaches them when they want to be reached, not when someone decides to interrupt them.
If you run a B2B company or you’re a B2B marketer, this is an especially important development that should drive your thinking and your strategy for marketing and sales success in the 21st century.
There are two core principles that drive what we do at WordWrite:
First, your capital “S” Story trumps your brand and drives all of your marketing communications – your Story is the narrative that makes someone want to buy from you, work for you, partner with you, sell to you or invest in you. It’s what we help our clients uncover and develop through our StoryCrafting process.
Second, strategic marketing is no longer about wow, pop and fizzle that’s intended to interrupt and somehow, by humor or hubris, compel someone to buy. Creativity, design and other elements at the heart of great marketing today are table stakes. They are essential and yet insufficient drivers of success. Today, marketing success is driven by tangible, measurable results. And that’s what inbound marketing provides.
Are traditional advertising and journalism about to go the way of the horse and buggy? I surely hope not. I do know that if they are to survive, they must leave the manure behind and adapt to the 21stcentury realities that drive global commerce.
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Paul Furiga is president and CEO of WordWrite Communications. You can find him on Twitter @paulfuriga.
