• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, January 4, 2017

Dan Greenberg, co-founder and CEO of Sharethrough, a provider of native advertising software for publishers, maintains that 2017 will be the year that programmatic capabilities will come to native advertising. Greenberg also tells Native Insider that buying techniques will begin to mature and have a creative impact on native advertising that consumers will see.

Greenberg said that “we’ll start to see brands take better advantage of the dynamic nature of native ads and invest more heavily in native video—both in dollars and creative attention."

Greenberg shared with NI three ways he sees these trends breaking through:

Native optimization goes "on-demand" with better research and creative tools:  

Native ads are comprised of dynamic, changeable parts and brands will want to optimize their creative assets while it still matters, instead of waiting for next year’s campaign. This speaks to the need for real-time creative optimization, or dynamic creative optimization.

Consumers read native headlines, even if they don’t click on them. It’s going to become important for brands to understand the true influence of their native ad copy decisions quickly—beyond mere clicks—and make adjustments to them while campaigns are still running. This means that this year, we’ll start to see a much more fluid collaboration between the people making the creative, the people studying the impact of that creative, and the platforms that the creative assets are running through. The entire process is speeding up and entering an on-demand era. 

In-feed native video becomes a premium video category for mobile:

Native video has proven itself as an incredibly powerful way for a brand to drive efficient video views and boost awareness of specific messages with accompanying headlines. Research has shown that brands can increase brand lift, message recall, and purchase intent in just seven seconds. This trend has combined with a general explosion in mobile video watching, especially among younger audiences, and has led to an overall increase in liquidity in the native video market. With the pipes in place for native video to be traded programmatically, this is bound to be a burgeoning area in 2017. Video will become the default setting for native advertising before too long. 

Creative strategy fully embraces the silent autoplay era on mobile:

According to the Martin Agency, 94% of the video ads it places on Facebook are viewed silently. Silent autoplay video has become such a dominant audience experience, both on and off Facebook, that a modern creative approach demands these elements be integrated into the experience. Brands have an “attention audition” now with silent autoplay video. Captions need to impart crucial information to people who scroll through the feed, and entice people to click through and watch the compete video. This year, I expect we’re going to see a much more sophisticated pairing of copy via captions—headlines and descriptions—which will increase the brand impact for people watching on silent autoplay.