Lon is the CEO of Bidtellect, the Native platform built for marketers. He is a veteran operating executive and adviser in the internet publishing, print, television and broadcast music industries and a well known pioneer in interactive media.
Articles by Lon All articles by Lon
- Think Outside 'Walled Gardens' Once Facebook Shutters FBX in
Real-Time Daily on
10/03/2016
Facebook recently announced that in November it would be shutting down FBX, its desktop ad exchange that allows advertisers to buy retargeted desktop ads on Facebook's platform through third-party partners. Of course Facebook has enormous scale and reach. But the good news for advertisers is that the ecosystem outside of Facebook - the open Web - consists of hundreds of premium Web properties with unduplicated audiences. This is where the majority of online content is created. The open Web has existed since the advent of the ad-supported Internet, and was built for this very reason: to enable advertisers to reach targeted, unique audiences with their content. And the best part? They can do it at scale.
- How Standardization Is Helping Native Advertising Scale in
Native Insider on
03/18/2015
In the early days of Internet display advertising, standards -- including standard banner ad dimensions, tracking methodologies, and delivery verification -- helped make it easier for big ad spenders to shift dollars away from other more established media.. Most of all, standards took a significant amount of pain out of the process of planning, buying and selling digital advertising. That same dynamic, and need, is asserting itself in the world of native advertising now.
- The Rise of Native Ad Exchanges in
Native Insider on
02/11/2015
Only about nine months ago, I was attending an invitation-only digital media conference. During a panel on the topic of programmatic advertising, in a room filled to overcapacity, a heated exchange broke out and quickly spilled into the audience. On one side of the debate were a small but vocal group (yours truly among them) who believed that native programmatic was a concept whose time has come. On the other side, in vastly superior numbers, were those who believed that programmatic and native were completely incompatible, that the very term "native programmatic" was practically an oxymoron. How quickly times have changed. This past October, IDC released a report predicting that by 2018, native programmatic as a category would reach $5.25 billion in revenue.
- In 2015, Brands Will Think Like Publishers in
Native Insider on
01/07/2015
When the initial wave of native advertising began just a few years ago, the advertisers were predominantly publishers, not advertisers in the traditional sense. They used tools like Outbrain and Taboola's content recommendation widgets as a cost-effective way to drive traffic back to their sites, where they could sell their own advertising at a premium. Now it's brand marketers' turn to go all in on native, as advertisers large and small are rushing to launch true native ad campaigns. As they do, they know that to effectively succeed, their own content needs to take center stage. Content creation coupled with content distribution is what publishers do best. As brands embrace native, they must (and some already do) think like publishers.
- Big Data Is Finally Going Native in
Native Insider on
12/09/2014
The ability of big data to help improve targeting, cost efficiency, and relevancy -- to name just a few elements -- has been growing particularly fast in display advertising and video. Yet if ever a digital advertising approach were created specifically to benefit from big data, native advertising would be it. Relevance, context, targetability: all can make native ads that much more "native." However, native ads presents some unique challenges., since they are non-standard in implementation and have typically not had large data sets from which to draw.
- How Native Ad System Is Becoming Brand-Driven in
Native Insider on
11/12/2014
Advertisers embrace native because the ads produce results beyond what they have come to expect from banners, and publishers like the format for the same reason. Moreover, consumers have shown a real willingness to engage with these ads, as several recent studies have demonstrated. Here are five major trends we're observing today in native:
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