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Over the past few years, the digital advertising market morphed to center around the "pull" of content marketing rather than the "push" technique of traditional advertising. This is good news for Long Beach-based Nativo: “The market took a hard shift, a 90 degree turn towards what we built,” SVP of Strategy and Operations Chris Rooke said.
What Nativo built in late 2012 - and has been iterating since - is a scalable and automated native advertising platform. Essentially it’s a CMS inside of an ad server “like what you would see in display advertising,” Rooke said. Publishers use it so they can activate, deploy and manage native ad placements. Marketers use it to distribute their content in the most relevant way possible.
“When you have brands spending upwards of $40 billion on content creation, it’s not feasible to distribute them through traditional ad channels because users have trained themselves to ignore these things,” Rooke said.
That’s why over 250 publishers and over 2,000 publications have turned to Nativo. Nativo has the luxury of being in the market for about four years, “so we’ve had a lot of time to get in front of any other vendor claiming native capability,” Rooke said. But market timing isn’t the only factor Nativo has going for it - the company has closed a couple funding rounds from investors including Greycroft, e.ventures and Signia Venture Partners.
Because of these factors, the platform is already fielding over a billion monthly ad calls. That means a lot of data: “We are sitting on more data than anyone else,” Rooke said.
That data gives Nativo key insights like which branded content is performing best, which enables Nativo to perform auto A/B testing for users. The data also gives brand marketers new insights about content marketing - telling them which spots to push ads and which would are best reserved for editorial.
Nativo’s marketer and publisher sides of the team both collect this invaluable data and it is then brought together by one Nativo data scientist that sits in between the teams, extracting broadly applicable information. This information is what Chris said will set Nativo apart as an industry expert.
“Now you have all these really rich insights to bring back to these publishers. You really then have these no-waste propositions,” Rooke said. “Ultimately Nativo’s true expertise going to be substantiated and solidified because no one else has the kind of data we have.”
