• by Skip Brand , May 29, 2013

Native advertising has become the darling of the premium publisher. The Atlantic, Conde Nast and Hearst are among those that have taken brand content and fitted it neatly and appropriately within their own editorial content, in a way that makes it clear that the content is advertorial in nature, yet still ensuring it receives due attention.  The resulting native ads are, very effective, if my experience is an indication.

But how scalable are they?

On the brand side, how many times and in how many places can Porsche run its “Where Design Meets Technology” native campaign? How many eggs were placed into The Atlantic’s basket with that single ad buy? And publishers, how many designers and developers does it take to incorporate that campaign into your site? I recognize that these are certainly high-ticket, highly profitable ad buys, but it seems to me that it would make sense to create ads that are similarly effective, far more automated, and infinitely more scalable.

I’m not recommending that premium publishers revert back to IAB legacy units sold exclusively on exchanges. What I’m recommending is much more powerful and infinitely better suited to premium publishers.

I’m talking about scalable, standardized native advertising.

That may sound like an anomaly, but it’s not.  Companies like Outbrain have had offerings like this for eons now. And while their solutions are great, they’re more bottom-of-the-page stuff (not truly branding or single share of voice). It’s not what I’d consider premium by any stretch.

What I’m thinking of with standardized native is much more stellar, involving rich media, tablet and oversized units -- much closer to the “Never Been Done Before”-type ads many leading publishers prefer. The IAB Rising Stars offer a means to create premium native ad units that can be bought and sold programmatically. Multi-module units like the Portrait can be broken up to allow advertisers to publish their premium content in any imaginable format, while leaving one module for the publisher to promote related content. If we stick with our Porsche example from above, Porsche could promote its “Design Meets Technology” content in one module and a video of a Porsche on the Autobahn in another. The publisher could, in the third module, share editorial pieces on contemporary auto design, or its most recent review of the Porsche model in question.  It is important that each module relate to paid, earned (content marketing) and owned.

How is this native if it’s leveraging a standard ad unit? It’s native because it features custom content and, done right, molds seamlessly to the page hosting the ad.  The units look and feel like part of the site, and they feature both branded and relevant editorial content. Changing the content to fit the page or context it is on makes it native. 1000’s of content and 1000’s of site combinations are possible.

Of course, scalable native units don’t have to rely entirely on IAB Rising Stars. HTML5 templates could work equally well. But the advantage lies with the standard unit. Why? Because while both can be bought and sold programmatically, IAB standards are (as the name indicates) standard and therefore more scalable, and therefore more likely to be accepted across publishers. HTML 5 is a standard plus IAB Rising Stars is a good standardized start. That’s significant because, as MediaPost’s  Joe Mandese recently reported, exchange-based media buying is growing rapidly, expanding 35% in April 2013 over April 2012. Online advertising is speeding headlong toward automation, and programmatic is only going continue growing. Fast.

So to answer the question posed by the title of this article: No, programmatic and native are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it’s my opinion that premium advertisers who rely too heavily on custom placements and look to RTB to simply fill in the gaps are missing an opportunity. How a publishers handles its tier 1.5 or tier 2 inventory is how good a publisher can get with its tier 1 inventory. While there will always be a place for those creative “NBDB” wonders, programmatic should be viewed as more than just a supplement to those labor-intensive buys.  The opportunity is there to make scalable native via premium programmatic your bread and butter. Then those custom placements remind be of the “Saturday Night Live” skit. The Native Ad + Programmatic is a “floor wax and a dessert topping!”