WTF do People think Native Ads are?

I had the pleasure on attending the Native Advertising Round table, a panel discussion on digital native advertising. Aside from one publisher, it was made up of technology providers each with their spin on the subject. What I heard was jaw dropping idiotic.

Since the panelists were CEOs and founders of companies in a very complex industry, our industry, and they had enough credentials to speak at this meeting let me first give them the respect they deserve as very smart people with innovative ideas and approaches. But what they had to say was downright stupid.

Let me first provide my own definition of native advertising. Native advertising is an ad placement that is unique to a publisher's property. That's it. If we need to distinguish between content and display advertising then we can do that although, at its core, native is unique to a property regardless of its form. If you don't agree with my definition then please Google the definition of Native.

"Native is the New Black" is because it solves the problem of ad blindness. Audiences are ignoring the standard billboards they see on every page. Native ads not only stand out but they also do a much better job of associating the advertiser's brand with the quality of the publisher's brand. 

In our industry we are automating everything and Facebook and Twitter have come out with or are launching exchanges for their native ad units. They can do this since the scale they provide allows for audience targeting. Programmatic native platforms will only be offered by the supply side since the creative an advertiser submits must be unique to the channel - since the ad formats are unique to the channel. Anything that scales across many sites is not unique to a channel and thereby not native. Once an ad format is standardized you may want to submit it to the IAB for their stamp of approval so that Double Click can add it to their formats in DFA & DFP.  

The absurd comments that I heard during this round table included:  "Retargeting is native advertising". WHAT? If an ad follows you from site to site then it is not native. Standard ad sizes are not native. If you want to argue that a specific targeting methodology is native to a channel you may have a point but retargeting is not that since it does not live within the publisher. The round table talked about Zappos shoe ads following them from site to site.

Everyone around the table agreed that the future of native advertising is standardization. I slapped my forehead. Again, if it is the same for more than one publisher, then it is not native to that publisher. 

CheckM8 is a rich media technology company that specializes in custom or Native ad formats. The ad units that we build can be unique to a publisher's or a channel. I say "can be" since the minute the same format is used by two of our partners it is not native.  

That is all. Thank you for reading. I appreciate your comments and feedback. Maybe even a healthy discussion.