• by Skip Brand , August 5, 2014

TripleLift CEO Eric Berry envisions native advertising as the means to unlock the premium programmatic opportunity for brand marketers. Leave it to a lawyer by training, an MIT-trained product guy in practice, and an early employee at AppNexus to solve the challenges of native advertising.

Berry is looking to address an ever-declining ad engagement rate, remedy banner blindness, and help save mobile advertising through a programmatic native ad strategy.  His central tenet is to beautifully integrate visually engaging advertising content into the design of the site or application.  

Earlier this week, a study reported that 22% of marketers believe all online ads will be native in the future. Furthermore, the study found that text on publisher pages is expected to reduce in half as our connected devices move to image- or video-based sites. With this data, it’s hard to argue that Berry isn’t on to something.

TripleLift leverages existing RTB pipes, so DSPs can use the current bidding infrastructure for optimization, cookie-targeting, and user-based bidding valuation to scale across all screens and formats.

The native RTB secret sauce is computer vision and real-time rendering technology that formats brand’s content to match the unique look and feel of each website automatically.  Since publishers and brand advertisers spend a lot of money on their content, the technology mutually satisfies both brands and publishers to put their best images in front of the consumer in a simple, elegant and integrated way.  

Berry’s technology scans the publisher’s site to understand the format and design in order to integrate the brand advertiser’s content into the layout.  In order to deliver the native ad cross-platform, the software reads the image and makes content-aware adjustments to scale across mobile, tablet, web and soon, wearables.

But brand advertisers would also like their unit to stand out and gain the attention of the consumer, so TripleLift offers its publishing partners a tool to control the look and feel of the ad templates.

Native advertising has everyone’s attention due to its increased click-through rates, but other analytics are necessary to judge brand success in premium placements. TripleLift’s technology tracks consumer engagement to understand how clicks and shares translate into sales.

A marketing technology solution marrying brand images with publisher sites via premium programmatic may very well be the key to make native advertising scale. As we change to a more visual web environment, it may take the mind of a lawyer-technologist to ensure this premium native programmatic solution will earn revenue for both the advertiser and the publisher.