Visible Measures has forged a number of supply-side integrations with AdsNative, TripleLift and DistroScale, adding “thousands” of publisher supply sources as a result of the deal, revealed Friday.
These partnerships build on the recent rollout of Fabric, a demand-side platform (DSP) designed to place native ads, used first by Publicis Groupe’s media buying unit VivaKi.
The DSP is primarily a managed service, though VivaKi’s Audience On Demand is developing a self-service capability for the DSP. Fabric can now match advertiser-uploaded creative against relevant publisher specs or formats via the supply-side partner integrations, the company claims.
One of the challenges when bringing native units into an RTB environment, according to Visible Measures’ CEO Brian Shin, is dynamically reformatting placements designed to live in one publisher’s environment so that they work in another’s. Companies like Nativo, Sharethrough and OneSpot are each attacking the issue head-on, which is spurring activity among the buy and sell sides to get into the native exchange-based groove.
Yet, the nascency of standards and measurement still ignites industry hesitation around combining native and programmatic, said Satish Polisetti, CEO of AdsNative, which raised a $2 million round in April to help publishers like Politico and Gothamist automate their direct-sold inventory.
On the other hand, native programmatic opens opportunities to maximize branding, Shin said, since it lets advertisers apply their existing creative assets to a more varied range of units, like in-feed or branded lists.
Marketers want the tools that enable this, which puts pressure on the sell side to diversify inventory. With publishers seeing increased mobile traffic (in some instances, it’s not unusual to see upwards of 60% coming from mobile Web, according to Polisetti), many are realizing the revenue benefit of powering in-feed formats.
“When you think about a publisher like Buzzfeed, which does such a good job with creating novel content, with a common set of assets like a list or gallery, the ability to dynamically repurpose that and distribute that elsewhere – [would be powerful]” Shin said. But having a native RTB spec, or other form of guideline, he said, would make the process of repurposing creative for different publishers less arduous and time consuming.
“At a macro level, native programmatic is about the intent to contextually match audience with relevant content in real time, whether that’s video in-stream or an article,” Polisetti said.
