What Is Native Advertising? Native advertising is a form of paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form and function of the user experience in which it is placed.
Native ads match the visual design of the experience they live within, and look and feel like natural content.
Native ads must behave consistently with the native user experience, and function just like natural content.
The largest social platforms in the world monetize with native, in-feed ads, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. The publishing industry is quickly following suit, as companies such as Time Inc, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and USA Today, continue to introduce new advertising integrations on desktop and mobile that match both the form & function of their editorial feeds.
The IAB Native Advertising Task Force (co-chaired by Sharethrough President Dan Greenberg) established six core native ad formats.
Sometimes referred to as advertorials or even native ads, leading publishers have launched sponsored content studios to create content on behalf of brands. Publishers include venerable media brands such as Time Inc, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and The Guardian, as well as new media companies like Buzzfeed, Thought Catalog, Slate and many others.
25% more consumers were measured to look at in-feed, native ad placements more than standard banners.
Consumers looked at native ads 2X more than editorial content and spent the same number of seconds viewing.
97% of mobile media buyers report that native ads were very or somewhat effective at achieving branding goals.
Sharethrough's proprietary research examines monetization and content marketing effectiveness and the digital advertising trends of the future.
Assessing associations through mobile native advertising.
Ad effectiveness study from IPG & Sharethrough.
Ad effectiveness study: Native video ads against pre-roll video ad units.
Study from Forbes & Sharethrough.
OpenRTB 2.3, a collection of advertising recommendations from the International Advertising Bureau, sets a standard for how native ads can be bought and sold through a real-time auction. With new support for native advertising, the OpenRTB 2.3 API and OpenRTB Dynamic Native Ads API provide a common language so developers can support the scaling of native ads.
An update to the IAB standard for buying and selling native ads at scale was recently released for public comment. The spec, known as Native 1.1, is an extension of a larger update to the OpenRTB 2.3 protocol, soon to be 2.4, that in 2015 ushered in an era of standardization for native advertising: programmatic native.
A good infographic is worth a thousand words. Check out these data visualizations using data from our platform and our research.
A collaboration by Sharethrough & Column Five.
IPG Media Lab & Sharethrough conducted an original study with 4,770 participants to study behavior.
How the feed changed the way we consume content.
Sharethrough & Nielson collaborated to compare the brand-building effectiveness of native video ads.
Together, we form one of the largest independent ad platforms and marketplaces worldwide.
Learn More →
