Page 335 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (https://www.iab.com/) defines a social ad
as “an online ad that incorporates user interactions that the consumer has agreed
to display and be shared. The resulting ad displays these interactions along with
the user’s persona (picture and/or name) within the ad content.” This definition
serves as a good starting point but should be expanded to also include user-
generated content.

To explain this in laypeople’s terms, imagine seeing a display advertisement on a
website such as CNN.com or NYTimes.com and uploading a photograph to it. Or
you could see tweets (Twitter messages) by other people appear within it, and you
could respond with comments or tweets of your own. Or imagine that you’re
browsing Facebook and you see a display ad that includes a photograph of a friend
with a movie recommendation. Those are all social advertisements because they’re
either infused with social graph data or with user-generated content. In the
second example, only people who know your friend will see that advertisement.

Rather than depending on just creative images to influence your customers to
make a purchasing decision, you allow customers to influence each other in the
display ads. And rather than consumers seeing just static quotes from other
consumers (after all, customer quotes aren’t new in advertising), the consumers
can respond to those messages with questions, comments, or endorsements of
their own within your advertisement.

From being a medium through which to push a message, the online ad is a location
for conversations in which consumers can influence each other. The display ad
becomes a tool in your social media marketing toolkit. That’s powerful. This
matters more than ever because as Josh Bernoff, well-known strategist and CEO
of Wellness Campaign (https://wellnesscampaign.org/), said, “People don’t
want to talk about products; they want to talk about their passions or their prob-
lems and solutions.” Let them use those ads to carry on those conversations and
influence each other in meaningful ways.

Native Advertising and How

It Can Work for You

An innovation in the online advertising space is native advertising, which bridges
the worlds of advertising and content. (The phrase native advertising is based on
the premise that the advertising is more native to the way the content is displayed
and positioned on the website or application.) These native advertisements are
intentionally made to look and feel like regular website content and often are even
produced for the advertiser by the editorial team of the website. Native

CHAPTER 22 Becoming an Authentic and Engaged Advertiser 319