The rebirth of native advertising

I distinctly remember being at an ad industry event in the mid-2000s when an analyst on stage bemoaned “the crappy 386 x 60 banner.” This was the original workhorse format of internet advertising that was nearly universally unloved. An agitated ad network CEO leapt to the defense of what the IAB’s then-CEO would regularly call “the much-maligned banner,” with the unintentionally hilarious riposte: “This industry was build on those crappy ads!”

Too true. But the shortcomings of banner ads were clear from the beginning. They weren’t anything like the magazine-style ads they were meant to mimic. For all the talk about how people got Vogue as much for the ads as the editorial, nobody went to Yahoo for Vonage or spy-cam pop-ups, much less those atrocious Eyeblaster ads that lived up to their name. The first home-run ad format on the internet didn’t appear until paid search ads were pioneered by Overture and then perfected by Google in the early 2000s. Search advertising was the first truly native advertising on the internet, possibly with the exception of email spam.

Native advertising in the early 2010s – does this decade have a name? – was developed as a way to change that dynamic. BuzzFeed was the earliest and loudest proponent of this approach, offering the promise of publishers using their content expertise to create ads that are more valuable to both sponsors and the audience. But native advertising mostly fizzled, serving for most publishers as a lower-margin option compared to, yes, banner ads. BuzzFeed even sensibly threw in the towel on going all native with its adoption of programmatic display in 2017.

Native advertising is poised for a comeback.