For SAP, content marketing and “native advertising” are not trends but legacies. The company has been in the business of educating its market for decades and views content as an imperative. Michael Brenner will explore how brands build content “strategies,” measure success and tie those efforts into the emerging ad models. He will demonstrate how three recent SAP “native” campaigns close the loop between content and advertising.

Custom builds, native experiences, deep integration with media environments – all well and good. But ultimately these bright shiny objects and explosion of non-standard executions have to fit on someone’s spreadsheet, become part of some overall media plan and suffer the same cost/benefit analysis as everything else. As “native” advertising comes of age is the practice being domesticated? Press mentions for novel ad executions no longer cut it. So what is the strategy for some of these campaigns? Are we moving beyond experimental one-offs and finding ways to tie the project together and into larger campaigns where the native pieces can be held accountable?

It is not just semantics. Native, Direct, Premium, Custom Content, Programmatic – direct, reserved, unreserved – all need to be sold at scale and understood in a rational marketplace of digital ad units. After years of striving towards standardization designed to drive confidence in digital display, things have exploded again into countless product labels as well as accountability metrics. Are rich banners being sold as “native”? Is this just the new “premium?” Are in-feed units being measured for their impressions or by the engagement in content they prompt? And how are buyers supposed to make sense of a native economy where non-standardization is a selling point? Our publisher panel engages the state of their inventory, how their offerings are being packaging and brought to market, and how they are being mapped against marketing goals and KPIs.

Digital advertising has come full circle. Native next is about the return of highly creative, entertaining and almost bewitching content that adds to the conversation, plays a bigger role in society and compels customers to think differently about the world they live in.

Despite its custom, non-standard feel and branding goals, native ads and content marketing offer a rich opportunity for both targeting rich experiences efficiently and rendering insights into how, where and why people engage content. We explore here the next steps in the content marketing – analytics. How are publishers using data on the front end to target experiences to the most receptive and influential audiences and optimizing on the fly? But we also ask about the transparency in distribution and engagement. Does it matter how and where a reader encounters content, how the user got to the engagement, and whether and how they shared it later? How are publishers charging? Against impressions, engagement, both? In this panel we explore how the bedrock of digital, data, can help bring greater precision, scale and order to the channel’s least standard ad form.

The poster child of native advertising, BuzzFeed, has now been joined in the trend by, well, pretty much everyone. We sit down with EVP of Business Operations Eric Harris to discuss the social news publisher’s second act. How does the BuzzFeed formula contend with relentless competition? Are these formats translating effectively to mobile, video, and visual social channels? And now that the social channels are clogged with native links, is the shared news economy suffering fatigue yet from list-ification, cute cats, breathless headlines?

Handheld screens turn most content into one-column scrolls anyway, so much of advertising is “in-feed” already. But is “native” different here? As major media audiences migrate to mobile, how are the online native formats porting across screens? Isn’t mobile a special case, where people are less interested in clicking out of an experience to engage in the deeper content experiences marketers are hoping to get from these formats? Does content marketing really map well with the many contexts, moods and modes that are the mobile use cases? Or are Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr and Vine setting a different better course by emphasizing visual, fleeting, branding experiences that feel truly native to mobile?

Arguably, native advertising is just content marketing as we have always known it distributed in new ways through socially driven channels. But readers can’t be tricked (often) into reading something that isn’t relevant to them. And the exercise is pointless unless somehow the brand is credited with the experience and aims towards some marketing goal. What kinds of content are proving most effective in satisfying these basics of the format and also getting distributed, discovered and shared at scale? We bring in the creatives, the new “brand editors” and “brand newsroom” leads to explore best practices in aligning brands with trends, interests and content.

The search for scale in native-like ad experiences leads to the usual suspects – automated creative, programmatic buying, demand side audience targeting, networks and real-time bidding. Is the net result anything resembling “native advertising?” But does the definition really matter? Maybe this is all just programmatic distribution of content. Ad units that just blend a little better. Recommendation engines gone wild. But is it poisoning the well – creating “content shock” and so many irrelevant story links and deceptive non-articles that we are just cluttering the Web with content instead of banners?