• by Lon Otremba , Op-Ed Contributor, December 9, 2014

Hardly a day goes by without someone commenting on the impact, importance and potential of applying large data sets and accompanying analytics to everything from weather forecasting to menu planning.  Commonly referred to as “Big Data,” it’s a huge trend finding its way more and more into the advertising technology landscape.  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..  This is because the emerging native ad tech ecosystem was initially built around individual ad units served into closed networks of third-party publishers.  The real fly in the ointment was the fact that these networks were closed; the data has been siloed away, and largely unavailable or un-actionable by the industry.

Fortunately, a new era of technology innovation has emerged to bring big data to native. With the emergence of open native exchanges, supply sources can be exposed to demand matching  of users programmatically, adding the capability to append third-party data to the stream.  Moreover, large user data sets, like Facebook’s, that used to be closed, are now opening up to third parties.

Introducing big data into the native advertising bid-stream has real benefits for nearly everyone in the ecosystem.  Advertisers finally have the ability to make native even more relevant than before, thereby raising response and engagement metrics to unprecedented levels.  Increased targeting options, advanced optimization techniques, granular level contextual identification, actionable campaign insights, and cutting edge fraud prevention tools are all direct results of having access to this massive data set. Publishers benefit for the same reason, and have the added benefit of making their own content more relevant too.  And most importantly, consumers benefit, too, since they receive a better user experience as a result and are not subject to irrelevant ad clutter.  

Big data is finding its way into the native ecosystem, and everyone stands to benefit.  And it’s a trend that will accelerate in 2015.  Count on it.