Native Advertising Days 2019: Formats, Scaling, and Emerging Channels

Native Advertising Days once again descended upon Berlin, with the 2019 edition held on November 11-13th. The entire native advertising community, which spans across more than 45 countries, met and mingled to discuss the topics of the day. MGID was engaged the entire time, presenting and hosting round tables on the most prevalent discussion points.

Native is not just a format, it’s an approach

The cornerstone of native advertising remains unchanged – quality branded content that comes in all forms and shapes. A well-crafted personalized story engages and educates the audience and therefore serves the brand’s needs. Nevertheless, the question of cost-effective promotion of such content has been raised at the Native Ad Days, both by the media and brands.

Nickolas Rekeda, CMO at MGID:

“Native branded content still remains one of the most efficient tools to grow brand awareness and communicate the holistic branded message. However, the content delivery and experience scaling is equally important. They need to be aligned with the changing cross-channel user journey”.

Brands tend to choose the performance-based approach over purely branded campaigns, focusing on measurable results, rather than reach. That was one of the key takeaways from MGID’s roundtable at the event. Publishers, on the other hand, are in a constant search for new revenue streams. In this regard, ad platforms could be the bridge between a publisher’s Brand Studio willing to meet the brand’s KPIs and an advertiser searching for new audiences.

Ivan Doruda, VP of Sales at MGID, moderator at a roundtable “How to best set up and scale performance-based branded native campaign”:

“It becomes clearer for the industry players that production costs for masterpiece campaigns creation are high, yet  acquisition and targeting options are quite limited for an individual publishers. We need a better solution that would facilitate collaboration between publishers, a technology that would allow them to more effectively target and engage sufficient audience volumes, thus satisfy advertisers needs in both quality and quantity KPI’s for their performance campaigns.

Publishers need a more holistic approach to deliver results for clients, and it can only be achieved by means of technology enabled collaboration. So that’s what MGID plans to focus on, giving a tool for Brand Studious to unite their efforts”.

This ad format has proven its effectiveness when it comes to increasing sales and improving the user’s understanding of the product. Brand Studios, however, still experiment with this ad format, trying to balance positive user-experience with the effective delivery of a branded message.

Vladyslav Stadnyk, VP of Publisher Development at MGID, moderator at a roundtable “How to most effectively engage and retain your audience  with native video:

“With over 85% of brands using video in their marketing strategy and over 80% of marketers claiming to get good ROI from video, it has become an essential part of the ecosystem. And yet, it is easy to abuse the technology and provide a negative experience for visitors. During the round table we were able to discuss how to better target audience and how to provide a better and more native video experience by delivering the same brand message through multiple approaches, including placements, techniques, visual representations and content lengths for different demographics.”