Native advertising isn’t new, but as an opportunity to seamlessly get in front of customers in the context they are already familiar with, the channel continues to grow as marketers are seeing true value. Gilad de Vries (pictured below), SVP Strategy, Outbrain, talks about the benefits of native advertising and how a marketer’s content can drive users to engage with their brand.

ExchangeWire: What are the benefits for brands/agencies, and what have been the main growth factors of native advertising?

Gilad de Vries: Native advertising is a huge opportunity for brand marketers to influence and create affinity throughout the customer journey. It's basically the only online channel that gets high attention and engagement from the audience in a positive way (as opposed to the negative attention you get from pre-roll advertisements before YouTube videos that you can’t skip). Because of 'banner blindness', banner ads have abysmal engagement rates (or click-through rates). But, with a well-executed native campaign, marketers can get consumers to engage with their content. For the first time, any marketer can tell their stories in long form with relatively low production costs. Gone are the days of having to fight to grab attention while interrupting viewing, listening, or reading.

Native advertising’s growth has been largely driven by digital marketers who have found that it drives amazing results. Additionally, it has also seen growth from brands shifting their budgets away from TV and print to focus where their audiences now spend the most time: online and on mobile devices. These marketers have seen how great branded content can have a significant and lasting impact on brand awareness and affinity, especially with affluent audiences.

Native is sometimes thought of as another type of advertising placement, what are the disadvantages of thinking about native in that way?

To succeed in native advertising, marketers must think about the actual value they provide the reader, measuring engagement as opposed to viewability, reach, and frequency. They would benefit from thinking about what content will drive a user to click and engage with their brand. This type of thinking goes beyond simple conversions, and also considers what messaging will build trust and nurture a new or existing relationship. Marketers need to have a long-term strategy and not look for short-term gains that aren’t sustainable.

Some agencies and marketers are scrambling to keep up with the budget shift from display to native. In a hurry, they may claim, "we also do native". It's easy to make the mistake of thinking of native as yet another placement and just repurpose a display campaign's assets to fit into native placements. These kinds of campaigns will usually lead to poor engagement.

What inspired the creation of the Outbrain Programmatic Access (OPA) platform over your previously closed marketplace?

Within our previously closed marketplace, agencies and brands had to leverage our data and our tech stack. They couldn't use their own first- or third-party data, or their own homegrown tech. With OPA, sophisticated buyers can now leverage their own data and tech to compete on equal grounds with our own native demand, which is the largest of its kind in the world. OPA partners, such as Criteo and Appnexus, are very selective about the audiences they want to bid on and the data proves that when they're bidding, and beating our own demand, they also provide great experiences to users, resulting in high click-through rates. With OPA, we're helping to accelerate growth in the category, exposing more marketers to the benefits of native advertising without forcing them to change their dashboards or workflows.

Gilad de Vries, SVP Strategy, Outbrain

How has acquiring Zemanta contributed to your programmatic strategy in the market?

The Zemanta acquisition is important for us in several ways. First and foremost, Zemanta’s back end is the bidder technology powering our recently announced Outbrain Extended Network (OEN). OEN enables marketers to use Outbrain – not just to reach their audience through the Outbrain direct network – but to seamlessly reach dozens of native SSPs.

Second, many agencies asked us for a platform that enables them to work with us without having to change their workflows. Zemanta is the only Demand Side Platform (DSP) that is dedicated to native, and was built for native from the ground up. Zemanta is also the only DSP that allows you to execute a campaign on Outbrain programmatically using either a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) buying strategy, which provides agencies with greater flexibility and a good way to benchmark which business model works best for them.

How do you address concerns in the market around clickbait and brand safety for native and programmatic advertising?

Outbrain is known as the leading premium Discovery Platform in the world. We pride ourselves on being very selective about the publisher partners we work with, and being totally transparent with both sides of the marketplace (publishers and marketers). This means marketers see exactly where their traffic comes from, and they can exclude any publisher they want. Of course, they can also blacklist keywords, so their brand will not show up on any article that includes off-brand keywords.

Publishers have similar quality controls over what appears on their pages. Outbrain has demonstrated many times in the past that if we get flags from users or publishers about rogue marketers, we don’t hesitate to pull them out. We have a very structured process, some based on humans and some augmented by technology, to vet content before and during a campaign. Unfortunately, there are many players in our ecosystem who care more about short-term gains than the long-term sustainability of the industry; so I believe marketers should be very aware and conscious about the partners they choose. Sometimes getting a lower cost isn’t worth the risk for the brand.

Where do you see the future of native advertising going? What new developments do you see coming down the pipeline in this space?

In the future, I believe all advertising will be native, or non-interruptive, advertising. Marketers need to adapt fast to a world where consumers have the means to circumvent any form of interruption (i.e. TV time shifting, video on demand, installing ad blockers, or listening to podcasts and streaming services like Spotify instead of the radio).

The only way to get these consumers’ attention is by getting them to choose to consume a message from the brand. To PULL them in as opposed to PUSH at them. To do that, marketers will need to add value, create stories, or provide a utility. Native advertising is, ultimately, the mechanism to get people to discover your content in the best moment. Just as it makes perfect sense to surface a search ad at the moment when people search for something, it also makes perfect sense to surface a native ad so people can discover you when they are already in a content-consumption mindset.