Aiming to facilitate native advertising at scale, Outbrain on Thursday said it has opened its native ad inventory to programmatic buying through AppNexus.
Outbrain Programmatic Access (OPA) will integrate programmatic demand partners into the content recommendation engine's native ad ecosystem and allow AppNexus’ global marketplace customers to bid on its inventory.
Previously, Outbrain ran a closed marketplace. Through OPA, select partners can participate in the marketplace and use their own data and technology stacks.
The move was meant to offer more flexibility to marketers. It’s also an acknowledgement that more marketers have moved to native advertising.
“A lot of marketers are shifting budget to programmatic to create more efficiencies and scale. First, they shifted display budget and over the course of the last two years, you see a large shift of budget to native formats that are more integrated into the user experience,” said Gilad De Vries, Outbrain's SVP of strategy.
He said OPA eliminates the need for marketers to use different platforms to execute native ad buys, which can be helpful when implementing the same campaign across geographies -- it’s a “frictionless workflow.”