A crowd of more than 300 top-class specialists from 34 countries took part in the second Native Advertising Days in Berlin, officially sponsored by BurdaForward and C3. International speakers such as Stephanie Losee (VISA), Michael Villaseñor (New York Times), Ekin Ozenci (Google) and Jason Miller (Linkedin) addressed the potential and conditions of native advertising.

“How native should native be?” was the theme of the opening panel debate, in which Tanja zu Waldeck, director of advertising at BurdaForward, discussed the challenges of native advertising for media companies with Lukas Kircher, founder of C3, and guests from Mashable, the New York Times and Adyoulike.

“As marketers and publishers, we should consult clients and get to know their strategy. Only then will we be able to produce the right native advertising stories. We have to label all native ads in the same way, so that users are able to recognize them easily and quickly. This does not only apply to our clients’ content, but also to contributions by bloggers, influencers and readers. We have to start a large-scale quality campaign to make sure that users will not also start to reject native advertising at some point.”

Tanja zu Waldeck, director of advertising at BurdaForward

“It’s all about attention” was the title of the keynote by Sonja Knab, director of marketing & research, and Kolja Kleist, director of customer & brand management, both at BurdaForward Advertising. They analyzed how companies are able to address their target audience systematically, offering them good storytelling to gain their attention.

Karsten Krämer, director of C3, provided information on how to use content campaigns to lead companies to measurable success. 

“The basic condition of successful native advertising is to understand the target audience and what they are interested in. The right content in the right context makes all the difference. Therefore we should focus radically on taking our target audience’s perspective, while also using the right media channels and clever algorithms. Brands need have no qualms about relying on experienced service providers and publishers when producing and distributing content. As part of their quality campaign, BurdaForward and C3 are using the Native Advertising Academy to take the next step towards successful native advertising.”

Karsten Krämer, director of C3

Karina Groschberger, brand manager at Huffington Post, and Martin Baier, head of Partner Studio at BurdaForward, showed how brands can learn from Huffington Post’s storytelling strategy and use this knowledge for their own native advertising campaigns. Stephanie Losee, head of content at Visa, discussed strategies for creating a native advertising content team. In his keynote, Michael Villaseñor from the New York Times presented storytelling innovations such as successful experiments with virtual reality both in newsroom and native advertising. Ekin Ozenci, mobile product specialist at Google, shared with the audience how to use DoubleClick to display responsive advertising formats quickly and effectively.