The Native Advertising Playbook

"Virtually any media outlet producing and distributing quality content to targeted audiences can try native advertising."

In a world where media outlets are seeking new revenue streams in order to remain viable, the Native Advertising Playbook is designed to provide practical guidance on how to start using native advertising as an income stream for digital media. In particular, the Playbook offers step-by-step approaches, concrete examples, case studies, best practices, performance indicators, and links to (often free) tools for native advertising.

As explained in the Playbook, "Native advertising comes in many different forms and is sometimes called sponsored, paid or content advertising. The term 'native' reflects the idea that this type of advertising looks, reads and feels like any other content on a website or social network where it appears; hence, it is 'native' to the publishing platform's regular content and visual style. Unlike display ads, native advertising is non-disruptive for users and should offer content that readers choose to consume."

Native ads can be created by a third party (advertiser creates the ad and pays the media outlet to distribute it) or the media outlet itself. This Playbook focuses on the second type of native advertising model, where the media publisher is fully in control of the process of planning, creating, and distributing paid content. This native advertising can therefore be defined as: "Paid content produced by the editorial team in the same style as organic editorial content and distributed by the publisher; such content should be of value to the target audience and must be clearly and transparently marked as sponsored content."

The Playbook describes native advertising as a "win-win proposition" - "For media outlets, native advertising not only diversifies their revenues but also allows them to create more interesting and valuable content on topics that matter to them and their readers, build profitable long-term partnerships with businesses, and develop new skills and technologies for the publication as a whole."

Produced by International Media Support (IMS) in partnership with CityDog Media, an independent digital magazine and a leader of native advertising in Belarus, it is hoped that the publication will encourage and help struggling and expanding outlets take up this "doable, affordable and effective advertising approach". The Playbook may also be useful for organisations and foundations promoting and supporting the sustainability of independent media, and it can assist researchers in better understanding some innovative and creative responses developed by media outlets in Eastern Europe.

The guide makes the point that native advertising can be used in all contexts where there are basic components of a market economy. Although the guidance draws on the experiences of CityDog - whose native advertising business model is based on developing and implementing longer-term (3-10 month) specialised content projects that target one creative topic in partnership with private companies - the guidelines are supposed to be easily adaptable to different types of native advertising models.

Guidance is offered on the following key steps to starting a native advertising strategy:

• Building a team
• Organising workflow
• Budgeting for a native advertising project
• Content distribution
• Communicating with clients
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and measuring success

Other examples of successful native advertising models employed by independent outlets are also highlighted - all from countries with serious but diverse political, economic, and media challenges. The case studies, covering different models and formats of native advertising in digital and multimedia, are:

• Special Thematic Projects - LOCALS, Moldova
• The Annual Contract and Defined Media Plan - Varosh, Ukraine
• A Creative Agency for Social Change - Platforma, Ukraine
• Native-only Content Monetisation - Kloop, Kyrgyzstan
• Native Podcasts and Video Stories - YOUR.TJ, Tajikistan

The final sections in the Playbook include useful tools - such as Tilda Publishing, Infogram and Thinglink - as well as a list of the main takeaways.

As explained by the publishers, this is the first in a series of Revenue Playbooks that are designed to deal with more unconventional media revenue streams.