‘Native advertising’ – the buzziest of buzz words

I started using Flipboard regularly a few months back. (It might be the next great social network, don’t you know.) I don’t just mean in the sense of viewing their category feeds (Business, Design, Style etc.) or the stream of those I follow on Twitter more graphically – both of which I also do – but to create my own feeds or ‘magazines’, in their parlance.

That’s not because they garner lots of eyeballs for Collective Content. In fact, despite the odd bit of promotion I’ve done, hardly anyone follows the mags (which are excellent, by the way).

It’s more because it’s an easy way to pull together various links on subjects that I professionally care about in a way that is easy – pretty, even – to look back at later.

The two mags I maintain are called ‘Collective Content’ and ‘Native advertising’. The first is a catch-all for almost all the content marketing-related subjects my business cares about. I say “almost all” because the other magazine is about native advertising, which is really a sub-section of the first mag.

And here’s the rub. This post isn’t really about Flipboard – which looks like it has a great future – but how people respond to terms such as content, marketing, content marketing and native advertising.

It appears ‘native advertising’ punches above its weight in terms of attention, even though I ‘flip’ to it about five times less often than my Collective Content magazine and even though it is a minor piece of the whole realm of what’s possible now.

I don’t know for sure why that is. Native depends on media publications (arguably also Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media) in a way that other forms of content marketing don’t.

And publications still have a combined louder voice than content emanating from companies. So of course native is going to get more airtime. Just a theory.

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Follow Tony on Twitter – @tphallett