President and CEO Justin Choi founded Nativo in 2010 to scale native advertising for brand advertisers and publishers. Brands started to shift to more content marketing, rather than traditional banner units, as publishers struggled to monetize their advertising models. Nativo anticipated the need to easily scale site-specific distribution and the need to so with a software product. So the company built a native advertising platform to help publisher monetization, deliver a higher performing ad product to marketers and provide consumers with a better user experience. The SaaS solution is gaining Nativo attention, like when it was named one of LA’s Hottest Tech Start’s at LA Tech Summit in the fall.
Native advertising is advertiser content that integrates to site content, typically located within the site alongside editorial content, behaving like other content on a particular site rather than an obtrusive traditional banner ad. Nativo’s software integrates seamlessly with publishers (sites) and enables native ads to identically match each publication’s site layout in real-time across thousands of sites simultaneously. The biggest value in native advertising is that an entire brand experience takes place within the publisher domain and feels like a natural extension of a site.
“There have been many misunderstandings about native advertising, but most would argue this type of advertising is actually better for consumers as it delivers a better user experience and leads to brands using engagement rather than interruption to communicate with audiences,” Choi said. “It definitely is better for advertisers and publishers. Our mission is to create the technology that enables the category to scale.”
Nativo says its campaigns deliver 10 to 30 times higher performance than traditional online ad display units, such as banner ads. On one side of the business, Nativo works directly with publishers by providing easy online tools to quickly activate and scale advertising initiatives. On the other end, the company works with advertisers, typically brands, PR firms and ad agencies, giving them ability to immediately run branded content across various sites and mobile devices.
Nativo’s metrics show that users engage with their campaigns for 90 seconds on average. Their bounce rate, which means those users who spend less than 10 seconds on the page, is less than 3 percent, with a high percentage going on to visit the brand directly.
Serving both publishers and brands places Nativo in a unique position outside of other adtech companies that only serve one side of the business. The rapid growth of native advertising along with understanding both sides of the online advertising business helped build Nativo’s thought leadership and success in the category.
The platform works across traditional web pages, mobile web and apps. Nativo also has key capabilities, such as automatic headline A/B testing and other creative combinations, auto-optimizations to shift ads to the best performing content, integration with third-party servers and customizable ad units. The tool also collects engagement analytics to provide insight. Nativo has features on its product roadmap specifically designed to innovate brand storytelling and measure ROI.
Nativo also stresses they provide best-practice guidance to clients to encourage the know how to best leverage native advertising. They also stress transparency and ensure native ads are always clearly disclosed as “sponsored” or “promoted,” and that the brand is always listed as the author. Publishers built reputations on providing quality content and distinguishing between ads maintains consumer trust and loyalty.
Nativo raised an initial seed round in June 2010 and closed their Series A in October 2013, which included Greycroft, eVentures, BDMI, Siemer, Mesa+, as well as existing investor Signia Venture Partners. With this funding, the Nativo team expects double its size in 2014 with offices in both LA and New York.
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