• by Alex Weprin , January 9, 2019

The native ad platform TripleLift has hired Andrew Eifler to serve as senior vice president, product. Eifler will be tasked with moving the company’s expansion beyond native programmatic advertising into over-the-top video and connected TV, virtual reality and augmented reality, social media and voice.

Eifler was most recently vice president, product management for the programmatic advertising company AppNexus, which was acquired by AT&T last year.

TripleLift has been building out a number of new technologies to bring to market, including native OTT ad products, which it previewed for Digital News Daily last year.

Eifler says new ad products can help ad-supported businesses grow at a time when consumers are increasingly wary of traditional advertising.

“The legacy TV world has been effectively locked into a fixed set of creative formats — namely 15-, 30-, and 60-second interruptive ads,” Eifler tells Digital News Daily. “OTT will bring an array of new opportunities for innovation, from new non-interruptive, non-linear ad formats to actual digital product insertion, where a product placement is injected into existing video content.”

As digital ads continue their push into video and AR/VR, new formats and ad types will give brands and consumers a more engaging experience.

“Rather than sit back and watch an ad, there will be opportunities to create immersive or interactive ad experiences that will better capture consumer attention,” Eifler adds.