Well that didn’t take long, did it?

Via MediaPost:

 

Native Advertising Predicted To Dominate Digital In 2014

Say goodbye to the stigma associated with native advertising.

Following The New York Times’ official embrace of the once-controversial ad format, J.P. Morgan is predicting that native will take over digital channels in 2014.

“We believe native ads are quickly becoming the de facto ad format on mobile and increasingly moving into desktop,” lead analyst Doug Anmuth wrote in J.P. Morgan’s annual “Nothing But Net” report, released on Thursday.

 

(Read about the New York Times “official embrace” of native advertising here.)

More bad news:

 

As for what makes native ads so special, J.P. Morgan calculates that they deliver a huge bang for the buck. Indeed, according to the securities firm, native ads represented just 5%-to-10% of Facebook’s impressions in 2013, but accounted for more than 60% of the company’s revenue.

 

As if that weren’t ominous enough, there’s also this from Reelseo.com:

 

Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA) is one of the fastest growing forms of advertising and the capture of browser behavior is staple practice for video and display vendors (or their partners). But there’s a very fine line that advertisers need to tread regarding the tracking of their visitors. Too much can seem creepy, invasive and uninvited. Done right, it can be relevant and value-laden.

 

Relevant and value-laden for marketers, that is.

So there’s this pincer movement in the digital world: From one side there’s the native advertising assault, led by ads in sheep’s clothing that are tricked out to look like editorial content; from the other side there’s behavioral advertising that tracks your online activity then tracks you down with purportedly relevant and value-laden marketing messages.

And, of course, from the front you’re assailed with $170 billion in traditional advertising.

Only one place to go in that scenario.

Backward.

John R. Carroll is media analyst for NPR's Here & Now and senior news analyst for WBUR in Boston. He also writes at Campaign Outsider and It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
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