This Week in Native Ads 2/10

It’s a cold and blustery day in NY as I write this week’s Week in Native! A strong thread of conversation as we kick off 2017 is — who is gonna win native? As the industry hits an inflection point, in a winner-takes-the-majority kind of market, who is going to do that? The brands that won early on won’t necessarily get that mass market appeal. It’s something I’ll focus more on this year, who is breaking out and what are the drivers of that.

Notable Stories this Week

Polar unpacks the $50 content advertising ecosystem with their view that content advertising will grow from 6.6% in 2016 to 13.7% of the digital ad market by 2021. The write up is full of ammo and stats on native and the various layers.
FB streaming numbers plummet 94% highlighting YouTube’s dominance in online video.
ShareThrough integrates with Sizmek and launches with Corus.
TripleLift launches server side header bidding.
Challenges Programmatic Native needs to overcome.
The renewal rates of native – very good info. The most common reason for not renewing we hear is a lack of understanding of performance of the campaign.
Box promotes Tree Brundrett to COO to grow video + native.

Deals/M&A

BrandZooka raises $1.5m to focus on SME programmatic video.

Campaign of the Week

Royal Caribbean with T Brand Studio. On a day like today – where would you rather be?

Datepoints of Note

Between October 2016 and December 2016, the use of native video grew 3.75x, according to Bidtellect’s video run-rate on its platform.
From July 2016, the number of brands doing both native video and display grew nearly 3x by the end of 2016. The average split for marketers is 80% standard native and 20% native video
Of the 50,605 advertisers who bought space on the top-200 largest publishers online in 2016, advertisers who bought programmatic native only make up 8% (or 4,182 brands).

Events & Webinars