Can We Have Your Attention, Please?

Can We Have Your Attention, Please? By Heather Holder and Odin Soevik Internet users have a lot of experience in ignoring online advertising. The term “banner blindness” appeared around 1998 to describe online users’ acquired ability to ignore most banner ads as irrelevant to them. That’s 21 years of practice. Presumably, as new forms of advertising are developed, audiences have only gotten better at recognizing ads, and, if average click-through rates are a measurement, overlooking them. The Role of Personal Relevance Human brains are designed to perform “selective filtering,” attending to what is immediately relevant and [...]

Boosting Engagement with Inspire Promote: Sponsored Content

Boosting Engagement with Inspire Promote: Sponsored Content By Odin Soevik Last year we created a new Promote offering - Inspire Promote: Sponsored Content. Sponsored Content, a form of native advertising, allows clients to publish long-form, brand-sponsored content with the look and feel of posts within the discussion feed of our communities. (See, Turning Visitors Into Customers: Introducing Sponsored Content On Inspire). Unlike banners or other advertising products, Inspire Promote: Sponsored Content blends almost seamlessly into the feed. Yet we are careful to follow regulatory guidelines that ensure that the content is clearly labeled and not misleading to members and [...]

Know Your Audience: 4 Tips for Creating Compelling Sponsored Content for Inspire

Know Your Audience: 4 Tips for Creating Compelling Sponsored Content for Inspire Sponsored content or native advertising is advertising that has been integrated into the publisher’s platform so that it does not disrupt the audience’s experience.  Unlike banner ads or other advertising, the character of the content matches the native content that the publisher’s audience expects.  It has the look and feel of that platform.  The result is an almost seamless flow of content for the audience. Creating content that is smooth and harmonious with native content can be challenging when regulations need to be [...]