San Juan, PR – Connected TV’s continued growth seems assured. But there’s one area marketers and media buyers might want to explore to get extra advantage in this rising sea: native ad formats are emerging as a significant growth area, particularly in connected TV environments, according to Greg Sherrill, VP of Demand Sales at Magnite.
“Native ads have been a terrific area of growth,” he said in a conversation with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Beet Retreat San Juan. We’re starting to see a lot of adoption, especially in areas like tile ads on smart TVs. That has been a really nice growing partnership with us and LG.”
User-friendly experiences driving adoption
The appeal of native formats like tile ads, which are seen when the user navigates through their smart TV content, lies in their ability to integrate seamlessly into the viewing environment while maintaining effectiveness for advertisers. Sherrill highlighted pause ads as another example gaining traction in the CTV space.
“You’re starting to see pause ads come up in these same areas and it really takes a lot of unique technology to make these things programmatically enabled and to do so at scale,” he said.
Audiences’ reception to these less-intrusive ad experiences has been fairly positive. “Consumers have widely enjoyed these kinds of ad experiences and it’s something that we’re leaning into more,” Sherrill noted.
Scaling native through programmatic tech
Making these specialized formats available programmatically requires significant technological infrastructure. Magnite has focused on creating accessible paths for buyers to tap into these opportunities at scale.
“It’s becoming available on our Clearline platform for people to activate,” Sherrill said. “You need wide adoption of a lot of different technology partners or you can get very specific and know that if you want to use something like Clearline, it becomes very easy for somebody to activate.”
Broader marketplace evolution
Beyond native formats, Magnite has been working closely with agencies to refine supply path optimization (SPO) strategies and improve connections between buyers and publishers.
“We have great publisher partnerships. We want to help agencies as they evolve those publisher partnerships and discover new publishers,” Sherrill said.
The company’s marketplace technology, built on the SpringServe ad server, allows holding companies to differentiate themselves while enabling more direct interactions between buyers and publishers.
“The marketplace really enables buyers and publishers to interact on a really deep level that previously had to go through a lot of different supply technology and demand technology,” he noted. “Now we’re really enabling them to do things that they used to do years and years ago before programmatic came into the mix.”
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