SAN FRANCISCO — When native advertising rose to prominence in 2011, many onlookers believed that, to match the unique publishing environment in which they were delivered, native ads could not scale to the kind of efficiencies demanded by modern ad-tech.
But many a native ad vendor has proved that theory wrong. These days, it is commonplace for native ads to be bought and sold through programmatic trading platforms. And the same can happen for native video ads, according to one of the platforms.
“The market has definitely adopted native as a standardized, programmatically-viable and programmatically-sellable medium,” says Sharethrough’s Dan Greenberg, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“Programmatic is everything. There’s a component of our business, which is publishers selling directly, and even that’s shifting to programmatic … the future of that direct sale is private marketplaces and programmatic deals.”
Sharethrough has been one of the leading exponents of technology that lets advertisers and publishers deliver ad units that look like surrounding content in to a principally feed-based publisher environment.
It now helps the likes of CNN, Disney, Time and RollingStone.com do that. And last year it enabled an integration with Adobe Advertising Cloud, allowing advertisers to scale their ad campaigns.
In our interview, Greenberg speaks fondly about preserving an open web funded by both advertising and subscriptions, as a foil to the walled gardens which many advertisers and publishers are growing suspicious about.
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.