Interest in native advertising is reaching fever pitch.
Discovery platform Outbrain, for example, announced the acquisition of Zemanta this week, a demand-side platform for programmatic native advertising.
Using the Zemanta platform, marketers and agencies will have an opportunity to access a large native supply that spans numerous programmatic native networks and marketplaces including Yahoo, Facebook as well as Outbrain itself.
One of the ways that Zemanta has differentiated itself, and likely one of the reasons the company was an acquisition target, is in its ability to bid based on predicted user engagement, making it a rather seamless fit with Outbrain's offering. "Digital marketing has grown on the strength of two important trends -- efficiency gains from programmatic buying, and the effectiveness that comes with native advertising," said Yaron Galai, Outbrain CEO.
"Marketers no longer have to sacrifice one in favor of the other. By pairing Outbrain's global network with Zemanta's platform, marketers will be able to deliver scale, brand safety, and user engagement in one offering."
