According to eMarketer, US native display ad spending will rise 27.9% to $28.4 billion in 2018. While we can assume that this increase in spending is in large-part due to an industry-wide shift towards less intrusive advertising, we wanted to get a better understanding of why the industry leading demand-side platform, The Trade Desk, doubled down on Native in 2017. To learn more about their progress, we sat down with their SVP of Inventory Partnerships, Tim Sims.
- Why was Native so important for The Trade Desk in 2017?
In 2017 we saw a trend with brands increasingly wanting to diversify customer communications through format differentiation and custom messaging. Native is at the forefront of this trend as it provides brands with a different, less invasive type of customer engagement. That’s one of the reasons we will continue to see growth in native.
- How did you get employees and clients on board?
Our collaboration with clients is centered around creating a great, personalized customer journey. Native is an important vehicle to support successful customer engagement as part of multichannel campaigns – alongside other high growth channels like connected TV and audio.
- What was the biggest challenge you faced?
The continued fragmentation of the supply side is an ongoing challenge for marketers, but we view it as an opportunity to deliver engaging brand stories across multiple channels.
- What was your biggest surprise?
While it’s not really a surprise, we have seen a notable increase in brand engagement with programmatic partners. We are happy to see marketers wanting to go deeper into programmatic alongside their agency partners.
- What is the one piece of advice you would give to brands, agencies and traders that are new to Native?
Explore the different types of engagement available through native. Native lends itself to long-form storytelling opportunities which opens many possibilities. Utilize native in different ways through creative context and execution.
