CANNES — After Outbrain, Taboola, ShareThrough and other native advertising technology offerings, comes Plista.
That is the German native ad tech company acquired by GroupM two years ago. Since then, the agency’s Xaxis unit has been deploying native ad formats around the world, following recent launches in Russia, China and the US.
“Bringing it to the world is our mission,” says Plista CEO Nicolas Bidon, the former UK MD of sister company Xaxis, “About a year ago, we were in six markets, and now we’re in 12. By the end of the year, we should be in about 18 markets.”
Plista goes beyond standard bottom-of-story link recommendations and offers an array of formats, also for video, feeds, out-stream and more.
Although some industry folk have worried that native advertising, through which ads take the same form as editorial content, can scale, technology platforms are trying to prove the opposite.
In fact, Bidon is keen to differentiate. “There is confusion between branded content and native advertising,” he explains. “Branded content … leveraging deep editorial knowledge … has been around for many, many, many years. That’s the part that people feel is hard to scale.
“With Plista, we leverage a less intrusive type of advertising that’s more native to your content. We only sell on engagement metrics – whether that is a click or if it’s about a completed view.”
This video is part of a series titled “Exploring Data & Technology as Catalysts for Creativity.” This series was produced at Cannes Lions 2016 in cooperation the Xaxis. The series is sponsored by comScore. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
