Home » Native Advertising Not A Threat, It’s An Evolution: Rubicon Project Country Manager

16 November, 2016

Native Advertising Not A Threat, It’s An Evolution: Rubicon Project Country Manager

It’s something that we’re seeing increasingly on publisher sites in place of traditional banner ads, and it’s expected to grow something fierce if speculation is to be believed.

B&T recently caught up with Rubicon Project country manager Simone Krakowiak, who said, “Native advertising is still very much in its infancy and we’ll see it evolving so much over the next few years”.

Krakowiak explained that it’s up those on the buy and sell sides alike to evolve in response to consumer demands.

“Native advertising is not a threat, it’s more of an evolution,” Krakowiak told B&T.

“Publishers have to change with the times to offer different products and different ad suites so their own users aren’t affected and so they don’t lose traffic. That’s on the sell side.

“On the buy side, advertisers need to stay educated on things like ad-blocking and they need to understand what level of intrusion into a user’s experience is ok. With mobile devices, they’re so personal that the end user tolerates much less, and I think you’re going to get much more pushback when you put something quite intrusive like an OTP [over-the-page] on a mobile device.

“Ad-blocking is the consumer saying ‘I’ve had enough of this’, which is why we were seeing such a rise in native and advertisers are very quickly responding to make sure they’re getting as much of their inventory seen as possible.”

Programmatic advertising is still well behind the States in terms of progress, however, despite it being a much smaller market.

“You look at mobile programmatic spend as a share of total in Australia and New Zealand, and it’s tiny, at just one to two per cent. And then you look at the U.S. where it’s 70 per cent and that’s a huge gap.

“That’s obviously what’s driven a huge amount of programmatic growth in that country, and we like to think we’re only a couple of years behind these markets but I feel like it’s going to take us a while to catch up.

“I think we’re forecast to be at about six per cent by 2017, according to an e-marketer forecast. So that’s just a fraction.”

And on top of this mighty challenge, Krakowiak believes innovation on the mobile front is also something that can’t be overlooked.

“Mobile really is referring to mobility, which originally was a mobile phone or a tablet, but now nobody has a desktop computer anchored to a desk that they don’t move. Your laptop is portable now,” she said.

“I do understand why some people say ‘mobile’ is an overused term, because it is a little bit archaic, it’s a little bit misused and it pigeon-holes mobile and tablet in advertising.

“I think people do tend to bunch it together because there are constraints and different limitations with working with mobile devices, but as the internet of things starts to develop, you’re going to be looking at your sound system in your car with the likes of Spotify and Pandora integrating themselves into these new vehicles – and that’s a form of mobility.

“So through the internet of things, you’ll be looking at what’s mobile and what’s static; like fridges, lighting systems, and more of that type of thing. Maybe in the future we’ll be looking at your mobile versus your static types of media because everything will be digital.”

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Digital Advertising simone Krakowiak