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 [...]

Join the Party…Sponsored Content / Native Advertising!

Join the Party...Sponsored Content / Native Advertising! By Odin Soevik There are two ways to be invited to a party where someone is selling something. Either your host tells you, up front, that it’s a party where part of the event is sales-related, and hopes you’re interested. Or, there’s the kind where you thought you were being invited over for dinner but you find out, too late, that your host is selling you life insurance. When the latter happens, you may not know how you feel about your friend. It’s the same with native advertising. Sponsored [...]

Buzzword Bingo and Sponsored Content/Native Advertising

Buzzword Bingo and Sponsored Content / Native Advertising By Odin Soevik “Buzzword bingo” is a game in which everyone in a meeting gets a one-page grid of today’s business buzzwords. Each time a person in the meeting says one of the words, you mark the box with that word in it. The first person to mark off a full line of buzzwords, wins. If you work in pharmaceutical marketing, your bingo card definitely has some form of the word “storytelling” on it, along with a set including authenticity, relationship, brand equity, eWOM, influencers, and the old [...]

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 [...]