Open RTB Creating Clear Set of Rules for Native: Interview with Sultan Khan, CEO, AdMaxim

Higher engagement and retention rates are causing significant growth in the adoption of native advertising formats on mobile, over traditional banner ad formats and technology is evolving to support this continued growth. ExchangeWire speak with Sultan Khan (pictured below), co-founder & CEO, AdMaxim about native.ly, AdMaxim's new platform to allow advertisers to deliver native mobile campaigns at scale.

AdMaxim have just launched native.ly - what market forces drove the development of this platform?

We’re seeing a significant increase in investment into native formats across all the various different forms of native advertising in the market; across social, native style display, native style video, sponsored content and others.

All are growing rapidly and primarily because they’re working extremely well for all the different parts of the value chain. Users are engaging with them more, publishers are seeing a revenue opportunity and advertisers are seeing much better performance. It makes sense that the market is heading in that direction.

Data from Facebook and others has suggested a significant portion of all future digital revenues will be from mobile and native. So, combining the two represents a particularly strong proposition.

AdMaxim has significant heritage in mobile and we’re now bringing that to bear on native, with an advanced platform for marketers that integrates every native format and creative option within one real-time optimisation and precision audience targeting system.

With the native ad market experiencing significant growth, how is technology evolving to service this?

The biggest trend within native has been the push to provide the frameworks and infrastructure for programmatic native buying to take place more easily and more effectively. And, though it may have started slowly, we’re beginning to see it hit a tipping point with native, just as it did with display, video and mobile before.

One important development within this has been the OpenRTB protocol inclusion of a native specific framework. That’s helping to create a clear set of rules and engagements for buyers and sellers to integrate programmatic native.

Supply side ad tech vendors are also now offering tools to make it much easier for publishers to integrate templated customisable native formats into their platforms; whereas previously it required more heavy lifting and bespoke work.

In essence, the pipes are being put in place and the tools are becoming available to enable publishers to embrace it.

Are marketers embracing mobile native? How will native.ly help their mobile native strategies?

I think there’s huge interest, which is being fundamentally driven by the performance it’s giving. But, that’s not to say there aren’t challenges. People want to know the scale of supply is there and a diversity of sites are available through native platforms – that it’s not just a few publishers embracing it. Thankfully, that’s part of the change we’ve been seeing over the last 6-12 months.

In terms of how native.ly can specifically help mobile native strategies, I think giving access to scale and advanced programmatic for native formats will be important, especially the synergy they afford from working together.

There are other native platforms on the market - what sets native.ly apart?

It’s true, there are other programmatic native platforms on the market, but it’s really important that the platform is built on top of an integrated programmatic infrastructure and full ad-tech stack.

This fundamentally makes a difference to how you can scale the proposition. We have an experienced, dedicated integrations team and offer advanced audience targeting and data management capabilities. You don’t just get that out of the box, it takes a lot of time and effort to build it and we’ve been pioneering new techniques and technologies in mobile advertising since the very beginning.

Essentially, we’re well-equipped to do programmatic at scale and, if you add native capability to that, it becomes a very strong combination.

Another aspect that really sets native.ly apart is the fact it offers its own creative suite and content production service for building rich media ads. Called Content Hub, it allows users to rapidly create branded content and rich media experiences using existing assets, making the process of integrating native into brand communications much easier.

How will native.ly future proof AdMaxim's position in the mobile native market? What's next for mobile native?

It’s definitely an evolving story, one we’re looking to build out with new inventory resources. We absolutely want to include social into what we’re doing, as well as search, which we see as a big part of the native story.

A big area of focus for us that we think will play a significant part in native’s evolution is dynamic creative optimisation, using unique data points – such as location, page context, weather, past purchases – to dynamically tailor the ad for the individual. Dynamic creative optimisation is a huge growth area for programmatic in general but especially so for native because of the fact that you’re able to dynamically compile the creative on the fly each time.