Nativo, a branded content ad tech platform, is partnering with MNI Targeted Media, the media planning-buying services and digital solutions company owned by Meredith Corp., to expand branded content offerings to the regional and local advertisers MNI works with.

The partnership will bring native advertising campaigns to small and mid-size brands, which previously may have felt branded content was cost-prohibitive.

“Brands of all sizes will now consistently benefit from high-performance campaigns by pairing Nativo’s highly effective sponsored-content distribution platform with MNI’s expansive footprint in markets across the country, both large and small," stated Casey Wuestefeld, vice president of platform operations at Nativo.

Wuestefeld told Publishers Daily his role, in part, is to “democratize native” by lowering the barrier of cost to regional and local advertisers, so they do not have to pay “really high budget minimums.”

Nativo and MNI have a “long-standing partnership,” though limited to a small portion of MNI’s full roster of clients. Smaller brands couldn't “spend the dollar amount to get that managed service,” Wuestefeld said.

Now, that partnership is expanding.

Klarn DePalma, executive vice president of MNI, stated the partnership will "empower" MNI's advertisers with Nativo's branded content formats.

MNI is particularly interested in bringing Nativo’s Native Article offering “to their entire roster of clients through this partnership,” Wuestefeld noted. Native Article allows sponsored content to open up within a publishers’ own site, rather than take the reader off to a different page.

For example, if a reader clicks on a sponsored post on US News & World Report, they can engage with the content on a page hosted by US News.

A local restaurant in San Francisco can now advertise on an endemic, national site like Saveur.com or a local market site like SFGate.com, Wuestefeld said, and not be restricted by budget restraints.

Nativo is able to lower that barrier to entry because its platform has “improved over time,” with a lot more scale and publisher partners, Wuestefeld said. “We have enough inventory in the smaller markets. We have the scale… for regional and local advertisers to have meaningful impressions for any given campaign.”

The platform also has automated a number of functions, reducing some of the overhead and making the process more efficient, Wuestefeld noted.

MNI delivers localized support to its nearly 1,300 advertiser clients. The company offers a suite of online and offline magazine media solutions, from programmatic to magazine cover-wraps.

Wuestefeld found that when the barrier of entry was lowered, advertisers “leapt at the opportunity” for native advertising. “MNI has established relationships and a customer base. It can evangelize this offering,” he said.

Nativo says effective content marketing is able to achieve five-times more conversions than traditional display retargeting. In 2019, U.S. advertisers will spend $43.9 billion on native display ads, or 62.7% of all digital display ad spending.