Commentary

Xaxis' Native Play Has A Programmatic Bent

Xaxis, GroupM’s ad-tech unit, signaled its intention to tap into programmatic native advertising by announcing Tuesday it would integrate Plista, a Germany-based native advertising specialist bought by Group M more than two years ago, within Xaxis. The company also named Nicholas Bidon, formerly U.K. managing director of Xaxis, Plista's global CEO.

The move suggests that Xaxis is placing a big bet on native advertising and that it will leverage Plista to enable advertisers to purchase native ads programmatically—that’s in-feed, outstream video, recommendation widgets and in-ad native ad formats. The offering will get additional heft as buying decisions will be supported by data from Turbine, Xaxis’ data management platform.

Xaxis’ move is a smart one and may compel other agencies to bulk up their programmatic offerings to include native in a significant way. “By leveraging Turbine data across the plista platform we’re offering a powerful way for advertisers to programmatically engage with their target audiences via well accepted native formats,” Bidon told MMG.

Running native campaigns at scale can be a challenge, though that depends largely on ad formats. For example, in-feed native ad campaigns are fairly easy to implement programmatically.

The beauty of the Xaxis move is that native programmatic ad buys get the benefit of Xaxis’ audience data, which is only going to make the offering more attractive and robust to advertisers. The data will enable advertisers to improve targeting for their native advertising as it sheds light on consumer intent and interests.

Plista has also opened an office in Thailand, which brings its global presence to 11 markets in Europe and Asia. There are plans to launch in the U.S. later this year.

Bidon told The Drum: “The combination of Plista and Xaxis’ Turbine gives an opportunity to bring the scale and targeting benefits of programmatic to native formats, which tend to drive more engagement than traditional standard IAB [Interactive Advertising Bureau] display formats since they are usually better integrated with content.”

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