What is an advertorial?
Straightforwardly, the word advertorial is the combination of the words advertisement plus editorial.
Here’s the skinny. People are used to reading editorials and often averse to reading ads, so if you format your ad to look like valuable editorial content, you’ve instantly gained credibility with your audience and will get a bump in readership.
20th Century advertising legend John Caples (and later his greatest disciple David Ogilvy) was the first to advocate and rigorously test the advertorial format.
One of his earliest split-run tests, in which one version of an ad was formatted as a traditional ad and the other as an advertorial resulted in the advertorial format getting 81% more orders. [Read more…] about What’s an Advertorial?