Native advertising has been a broad and somewhat murky category—encompassing everything from advertorials to bespoke, custom units to content recommendation widgets and rewarded video ads that typically run inside mobile games—but 2017 will be the year that some clarity emerges, with the broad classification breaking down into two distinct types: programmatic and nonprogrammatic.
“A number of factors have driven interest in native, despite lingering confusion around the term,” said eMarketer analyst Lauren Fisher. Among the drivers: “The successes of in-feed platforms like Facebook, concerns about ad blocking and the growing acknowledgement that desktop-driven formats like banners just don’t cut it on mobile.”
