IAB Releases New Deep Dive on In-Feed Native Ads

The IAB’s Native Advertising Taskforce today released a Deep Dive on In-Feed ad units with participation from many of the key players in the native ad landscape including PowerLinks, Sharethrough, InMobi, AdsNative and PubMatic. The report “looks into today’s in-feed advertising, specifically the consumer’s first experience or ad discovery with the paid content distribution ad.”

The IAB’s Content Marketing and Native Advertising Task Force groups conducted the Deep Dive as a supplement to the original Playbook, with a view to helping the industry to “speak a consistent language” and add more definite structure as we journey further into the year of Native Programmatic.

The report specifically focuses on Content Feeds, Product Feeds and Social Feeds. Content Feed Ads are defined as “primarily articles, images or videos”, placed within editorial news feeds; Product Feed Ads as “primarily products, services or app installs” within sites and apps; and Social Feed Ads as that which include “users’ posts, business’ posts, articles, photos, videos and status updates” that pull in social data. The Deep Dive also gives details examples and wire-frames for each ad type, and notes that disclosure “continues to be of paramount importance” to ensure that native ads are clearly distinguishable from editorial content.

Kevin Flood, CEO of PowerLinks explains that the Deep Dive “serves to provide some standardized language and comprehensive examples of the variety of native user experiences in the feed. Our biggest opportunity is the diversity of rich and engaging ad experiences that have evolved with the adoption of responsive design and feed-based platforms. However, this creates complexity – so the Taskforce is looking to simplify the structure of the ads of the future.”

Ultimately, the In-Feed Deep Dive has consumer experience at its core, and hopes to provide marketers and agencies with an easy digest of all the available creative options for In-Feed ads. In an article about the report, Susan Borst – the IAB’s Director of Industry Initiatives – said, “the need to evaluate the in-feed ads from the consumer perspective to ensure that they remain native, meaning that they are so cohesive with the page content, assimilated into the design, and consistent with the platform behavior that the viewer simply feels that they belong.”

You can read the full In-Feed Deep Dive here, and Anthony Ha’s take on the report on TechCrunch here.

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