Native advertising is hardly new.
Companies like TripleLift, which created the category of programmatic native, are now in their awkward tween years.
Which means it’s about time for something new.
Cue Advertible, a “native-as-a-service” programmatic vendor, as put by co-founder and CEO Tom Anderson. The company was founded early last year and only has three full-timers, all of whom are co-founders. It also hasn’t raised seed or VC funding.
But it has taken a quiet approach to build out a native tech stack by inserting its code into SSP customers. It doesn’t replace or compete with an SSP, instead creating a native channel.
“Ultimately, we are helping other SSPs get up to speed with the TripleLifts of the world,” Anderson said.
Native delays
Although native advertising has been around for years, it remains a hanger-on for many omnichannel programmatic companies. It’s akin to digital out-of-home channel extensions, which omnichannel SSPs often support only in an offhand way to accommodate certain advertisers. The idea isn’t to seize the opportunity, necessarily.
Many large- or mid-tier SSPs haven’t developed native products, which could require hiring an in-house team, or are swamped by the necessity of designing seemingly organic, customized units for individual sites, when some count tens of thousands of publishers in their roster, Anderson told AdExchanger.
And he’d know. Until a year ago, Anderson was the chief marketplace development officer at Emodo, the Ericsson-owned native SSP and DSP, which shuttered this month. Before that, he was GM of mobile for TripleLift for over four years.
There is a pre-bid native spec, “but publishers are just not adopting it,” he said.
And the reason is, well, complicated. There are formats and rich media that might change and must be updated. It requires engineering resources that publishers often don’t possess.
“So, publishers continue to lean on their programmatic vendors to do the heavy lifting,” Anderson said.
How it works
So, what’s new?
Advertible is a package of code that sits in the SSP. One of its jobs is to take a request for a banner ad unit and turn it into a multiformat request, Anderson said.
Rather than the typical SSP response, which is to retransmit that request simply for a banner creative, Advertible will also include requests for native images, native video and potentially outstream or other rich media. If the DSP responds with native assets, Advertible then renders the native ad with the look and feel of the site.
Advertible could work directly with DSPs or publishers, added Priti Ohri, co-founder and COO.
But it’s a matter of where the service is most needed. Advertible’s main value prop is for companies that must design native placements for hundreds or thousands of sites with different appearances, layouts and media formats.
A big publisher might have lots of sites in its network, but it’s really the SSP that has direct publisher connections and needs help tackling native at scale.
How Advertible accomplishes the task is – of course – by using AI. It creates native placement designs for thousands of publishers, which can take minutes instead of hours, Ohri said.
But Advertible is limited, in a way, by the fact that its potential customer pool consists of SSPs. There are a finite number of SSPs in the world, and many of them are unhealthy.
But Anderson said the company doesn’t need as many as 50 big partners to be a fast-growing, profitable operation.
The company is developing native video and will at some point have native CTV, “which will be a big unlock for us in the future,” he said.
There are only a handful of tier-one SSPs that really need this solution, he saids, plus another large handful of smaller or mid-size SSPs.
“We’re focused on key partners that really can scale,” he said, “rather than try to boil the ocean.”
