No-frills alternatives are helping our favourite brands survive

By Andrew Hughes Only a few years ago jokes about home brand products were quite common. Having a blue and white or red and white dinner meant enjoying generic brand fare that night around the table. But the recent intensification of the supermarket wars has seen the introduction of more sophisticated and aggressive branding strategies by Coles and Woolworths.

Design Annotator: Music for creative ears and alternative careers

by Uno de Waal (@Unodewaal) This week’s roundup: the multi-talented Louis Minnaar, Lize-Marie Dreyer’s Cool Capital Catalogue, Shaun Oakley’s Killing the Streets, Jordan Metcalf’s #NowPlaying, Eagle Awards 2013 campaign by King James, Mia Ziervogel of Dossier magazine, photographer Pieter Vosloo’s Barefoot, Lost & Hungry blog, and the adidas Originals Run Thru Time campaign.

Native Advertising: Traditional Advertising Online

Mashable recently asked the question, “Is Native Advertising Just Another Term For Good Advertising?” The answer is no, not quite.

From what I can tell, native advertising is a horrible and misleading term that is being used to describe something that may actually turn out to be a good idea — the application of traditional advertising principles to online advertising. Let me explain.

Online advertising was supposed to be interactive. It was supposed to rescue us from having to force people into looking at our ads. Consumers were going to want to interact with us, they were going to want to have conversations with marketers, they were going to want to have relationships with brands.

It was all fantasies and delusions based on naive interpretations of consumer behavior by people who had a whole lot of ideological commitment to the web, and very little experience with real world marketing.

Now we’ve learned that, for the most part, consumers want no part of interacting with online advertising. What we are calling “native advertising” is a recent reaction to this realization and to the very disappointing history of online advertising, particularly banner advertising.

Nobody seems quite sure what they mean by native advertising. But I think I know what they mean. They don’t know it yet, but they mean using traditional advertising strategy on the web.

‘Native advertising’ digital magic of the hour

You ready for the new online advertising miracle?

The digital advertising hype-cycle is growing shorter all the time. Apparently the online lemmingocracy has grown tired of “content” as the digital magic of the hour. Now it’s all about “native advertising.”

What is native advertising? Well, according to Solve Media…

“Native advertising refers to a specific mode of monetization that aims to augment user experience by providing value through relevant content delivered in-stream.”

Oh. Okay.

Now let’s pretend for a minute that we live on the planet Earth and we talk in a language that is comprehensible. Here’s what that BS means:

Native advertising is advertising that is pretending to be something else.

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