Where are all the native ad agencies? What is the best native ads agency out there? You can’t throw a rock without hitting a Facebook, Google ads or SEO agency (especially in Southern California…), but there just aren’t that many native agencies out there.
The problem isn’t necessarily with the format, it’s the fact that native ads aren’t a good first-choice traffic source for most businesses. Even though there’s an immense amount of scale and stability that comes with native ads (at least for the big networks like Taboola and Outbrain), those features only apply to specific types of offers.
Native is for Broad Appeal Offers
First of all, native ads aren’t appropriate for niche products, so pretty much any B2B product is out right off the bat, as are any B2C products that only appeal to small slices of the population. This is due to the fact that media buys on native don’t involve personalization—they’re segmented by interest via the publisher’s content, not data the publisher has on the user.
Your ad spend gets distributed across many different publishers, which means $100 might be spread out as $1 for 100 different websites! Filtering out low-performing publishers and optimizing creatives that can segment for you is what the game is about on native as a result. This is the opposite of what you’d expect on platforms like Facebook, where the platform has insane amounts of data about every user and can therefore shape the advertising experience for them.
Native Requires Far More Hand-Holding to Work
The big platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Google are now so dialed-in that most of a media buyer’s job is just making sure nothing breaks. It’s not an exaggeration to say that media buying is now almost entirely about creative production on those platforms. For anyone reading this who is just getting started in media buying, my suggestion is simple: focus on learning how to make great video ads!
Gone are the days when media buyers had to do everything manually on those platforms. This is due to the aforementioned rich data sets that they have on their users and the fact that all those customers are contained in one place (the walled-garden platform).
On native, this is not the case. Because you’re dealing with so many different streams of data across your publisher set, you need to keep a much closer eye on things to be profitable. Once you get to the promised land things get easier, but you can’t just set it to broad and send it like a Chad (as Peter Kell likes to say) on native. That’s a recipe for losing money, and the complexities of media buying on native is why (good) native specialists are hard to find.
Native is for Older Populations
Secondly, the average native user is older and, as a consequence, tends to be higher income. This is fantastic if you’re selling products like life insurance leads, but not so great if you’re trying to sell into the latest THC gummy craze.
Native customers are people who read big news sites like CNN and Fox News, so capturing demand from Millennials and Zoomers is not on the table. If that’s your target demographic, you’re better off spending your money on TikTok or YouTube.
Native is an Extension of Your Existing Campaigns
Now we return to our original question: where are all the native agencies? There are a few, to be sure, such as Nadim Kuttab’s Xevio (easily the biggest native agency out there), but the absence of a scene anywhere near as large as Facebook or other paid media agencies is odd.
Here’s the missing puzzle piece: native ads are more often than not an extension of existing campaigns. If you have an offer that’s hit scale on another platform and you want to squeeze it for more ROI, native is a good candidate. Since you don’t have to dial in the offer (as much) after validating it somewhere else, you can plug your creatives into a native media buy and run much more insightful tests.
Is Native Right For You?
The best types of offers for native tend to be those which convert for older audiences and solve very big, broad problems. If you’re running lead gen for financial offers, for example, native may be an excellent fit for you. But if you’re looking to run niche offers and/or offers that cater to a younger audience, it’s probably better to find a different channel to scale into.
Bonus Video
Although it’s a short clip, this video of Nadim Kuttab’s Affiliate World Dubai 2024 presentation gives some decent insights into who buys his services:
