'Native programmatic': what's all the fuss about?

Adam Furness
By Adam Furness | 13 October 2014
 

There's been a heap written about 'native programmatic' lately and I’ve got to admit that I’m a tad confused.

Adtech land is brimming with opinions on the collision of two of the industry’s most notorious topics - native and programmatic advertising. But, with all the brouhaha around these supposedly opposing forces and their push and pull on the industry, we may have gotten a little carried away.

Isn’t all good programmatic advertising native? If not, are both the advertiser and the programmatic service provider/s failing in their primary objective to deliver the right message, to the right consumer, in the right environment, at the right time?

The more common definitions of native advertising support this:

Wikipedia describes native advertising as ‘an online advertising method in which the advertiser attempts to gain attention by providing content in the context of the user's experience’ or ‘an online advertising method in which the advertiser attempts to gain the formatting of the advertising materials to make them appear more consistent with other media in the recipient's universe’. Buzzfeed describe native advertising as simply advertising that's ‘not shit’ or advertising that you want to share because it’s interesting, entertaining or relevant to you and your connections.

Whichever way you cut it, it strikes me that these descriptions are the definition of programmatic advertising and that if I was a marketer, I’d expect this from all of my data enabled or real-time advertising.

Right message - Right consumer - Right environment - Right time

Effective programmatic advertising is data driven, giving the advertiser insights on the attributes, behaviours, intent and interests of the intended recipients. Where these insights inform the segmenting and buying strategy, the content of the advertising is timely, relevant to the recipient and in context with the environment where it will be consumed.

Private market place transactions, between demand side players and specific publishers, mean there should be tighter integration between the ads being created and their final destination. What’s more, dynamic creative optimisation (the ability to serve multiple messages powered by data about the recipient) and white lists (basic site lists the advertiser wants to be on across the exchange environment), make the native promise even more accessible for brands. The challenge now shifts to the advertiser and their creative capabilities – providing ‘advertising that’s not shit’ and ‘advertising that an audience want to share’.

Online advertising that's not shit

Today there is no excuse for running bland, unimaginative creative. Rich creative formats are affordable and there are a number of third parties that can deliver dynamic, sequential, creative messaging. Knowing what your audience responds to requires basic testing to establish the right balance of content centric, shareable, playable, interactive executions across devices and channels. The results that we see, from both brand and performance metrics, more than justify the effort.

All standard ad sizes can now be delivered programmatically and the ability to feed real-time data into these ad units, such as up to the minute social network streams from Facebook and Twitter, means the message should be timely and relevant for the consumer.

So, what’s all the fuss about? All good programmatic advertising is native. It just needs us all to play our part.

Adam Furness,
Director- Enterprise Platform Sales

RadiumOne APAC

 

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