Native advertising is a form of advertising that integrates high-quality content into the organic experience of a given platform. Native ad units conform to the design and feel of the sites on which they display, preserving the immersive user-experience while producing click-through rates like that of editorial content.
We don't think of "Native Advertising" as the currently abused buzzword applied to anything that isn't a banner. We're redefining it as something scalable and superior. It's the intersection of beautifully customized native content delivery and the power of programmatic technology.
Programmatic native advertising serves each ad unit on an impression-by-impression level and leverages real-time data and decision making to ensure that the most relevant ad is placed on each site, creating a unique user-experience.
The term native advertising is broad and continues to evolve. When it first emerged, it was seen as a modern version of the advertorial. It's now viewed as a separate channel designed to deliver high-quality, value-adding branded content. In its Native Advertising Playbook, IAB mentions the core six forms of native advertising. We believe most of them can be broken down into three categories.
Study after study has shown that native advertising is more effective than traditional digital marketing methods. Some statistics from the Content Marketing Institute on how marketers perceive native advertising are:
According to eMarketer, in 2017 native spending grew faster than the overall display market, accounting for 58.3% of ad spending. And US native ad spending is projected to grow to $41.14 billion in 2019. The popularity of this ad format will continue to rise, as per BI Intelligence estimates that state native advertising will drive 74% of total US display ad revenue by 2021.
US Native Display Ad Spending, 2016-2019 (billion and % change)
Source: eMarketer, March 2018 (www.eMarketer.com)