This post was updated March 15, 1:40pm E.T.
“Native” is a hot buzzword in media right now. Naturally frustrated with the bland and inadequate display banner, advertisers on desktop, mobile and social are turning to native to be more relevant and noticeable to consumers online. Even here in Canada, native has proved fertile ground for ad tech startups like Polar, Pressboard, StackAdapt and Slimcut Media.
But native has also become confusing, as advertisers pursue two very different kinds of ad experiences both labeled with the term. On the one hand there’s premium, high-touch sponsored content that’s developed in partnership with publishers and hosted on their sites. On the other there’s in-feed ads, like those offered by Facebook, Twitter and various mobile apps, which preserve the cross-publisher scalability of banner advertising but with dynamic design and contextual targeting to shape each ad to its unique editorial environment.
A new Canadian company, Real Content Network, claims it can offer both kinds of native in one place. Toronto entrepreneur David Benoliel launched RCN this month with two key offerings: a premium exchange for Canadian publishers to sell and manage custom sponsored content, and a buy-side platform that advertisers can use to access 250 million Canadian impressions from international publishers like Salon and Tribune, plus native networks like ShareThrough, Vibrant Media and Taboola.
The scale side of the equation is possible through a partnership* with DistroScale, a programmatic native advertising company based in California in which Benoliel owns a minor stake. DistroScale was co-founded in 2013 by Navdeep Saini, who’s been head of engineering for DoubleClick, Yahoo search marketing and Mode Media. It has existing relationships with a range of supply platforms and global publishers, and processes about 2 billion impressions per month globally.
But Benoliel says banner-like in-feed ads are really secondary to “true” native – high-impact custom content. The biggest difference between sponsored content and in-feed, he says, is that the user doesn’t have to leave the publisher’s site to access the content. They experience the sponsored article or video in the same environment as editorial content.
Benoliel said he first saw the opportunity when he was looking for paid distribution channels on behalf of advertiser clients. “All the native solutions were little snippits of content that drove people out of the publisher’s site, and I was looking for ways to deliver our content directly within publishers’ sites, and to do it at a level of scale,” he said.
To enable this kind of advertising, RCN offers a supply platform and on-board content management system for publishers, similar to that offered by native publisher platform Polar. The technology, developed by DistroScale, supports a handful of native ad units: sponsored posts (which can be promoted either within the site’s editorial feed or within contextually-targeted articles as “related content” cards) and branded channels (which are essentially microsites where brands can curate the publisher’s content and their own).
It’s still early days, and right now RCN’s premium sponsored content offering is more vision than reality. The company has the technology and U.S. supply relationships, but high-impact native means direct relationships with local and national publishers, which Benoliel says he’s just begun having conversations about.
While the premium offering is in development, he plans to bootstrap RCN through the in-market reach it gets from DistroScale’s supply partners and the demand for Canadian inventory coming from its global buyers. Benoliel says there’s already a significant amount of traffic coming through the platform.
He said he made a conscious decision to call RCN a “network” rather than a “platform,” which has become the more common term for programmatic services. Networks – which fulfill similar functions to programmatic supply-side and demand-side platforms – have gained a reputation for lacking transparency and focusing on scale and efficiency at the expense of quality.
But Benoliel said he wants clients to think of RCN the way they think of a broadcast network: a sales organization representing a range of Canadian and international publishers. He wants to emphasize that RCN can provide custom distribution agreements for branded content, as well as content-sharing deals. Eventually, he plans to make publisher and third-party content available for brands to buy within the ecosystem, to use as the building blocks for their own native content.
“The philosophy behind the thing is that it’s more like a broadcasting network, where you have a lot of content you can pick and choose from, pull it into your posts and bring it into these distribution channels,” he said. “It will be more of a network where content can be uploaded, people can generate their own content channels, and advertisers can pick and choose those content channels to promote their products.”
* Update: This story initially stated that Real Content Network would have an exclusive supply partnership with DistroScale in Canada. RCN will act as a sales representative for DistroScale in the Canadian market, but other buying platforms will still have access to DistroScale’s marketplace.
