The document discusses the past, present, and future of native advertising. It argues that the future of native advertising is about creating natural content that offers value to audiences. This will involve developing networks based on common audience sensibilities to allow content to scale across addressable groups in a transparent way. Creativity and providing actual value to audiences will be important to the future of native advertising.

1. Started from the Bottom
The Past, Present, and (Ostensible)
Future of Native Advertising

2. “Story
stayed
the same.
I never
changed
it.”

3. “Get up
everybody
and sing!”

4. “Everybody
hurts—
sometimes.”

5. “Cash rules
everything
around me.”

6. “There’s
more to see
than can
ever be
seen.”

7. “I’m so
excited—and
I just can’t
hide it!”

8. “You would
hardly
recognize
me; I’m so
glad.”

9. “Lord, I pray
you give me
the strength
to carry on.”

10. “Because
you can’t,
you won’t,
and you
don’t stop.”

11. “You’ve lost
that loving
feeling.”

12. “I wish was
a little bit
taller.”

13. “Who can
say where
the road
goes?”

14. Nobody knows,
but…

15. The future of native
is not about native.

16. The future of native
is about natural.

17. “Natural” is whatever makes
sense at the intersection of
audience, sensibility, and
environment.

18. Content is more natural
in a digital world.

19. Content is more valuable
in a distracted world.

20. “Value” is whatever makes
people better off.

21. People aren’t defined just
by their demographics, but
also by their sensibilities.

22. Many publishers share
audiences with common
sensibilities, and most
platforms can easily identify
patterns across them.

23. The future of native,
therefore, is also in
networks.*
*of sensibility, that is.

24. Which brings up a key
point: scale is not an
actual problem.

25. Scale is a creativity
and definitional problem.

26. That’s also why the future
of native is accountability
and addressability.*
*the network thing solves the scale thing,
which solves the addressability thing.

27. Scaling native will put even
greater demands on ambition
and creativity, opening the
pie to all and demanding
more collaboration than
ever before.

28. But the future of native
could also be litigious
and regulatory.

29. The future of native
is up to us.

30. How do we bring it
all together?

31. The future of native lies in creating
media that naturally and transparently
offers value to audiences, who can be
targeted and addressed across different
networks and environments, often based
on their common sensibilities. More and
more, we’ll use content to reach and
engage them—but most important,
always, is ambition and creativity.

32. The future of
native could be a
golden age.

33. 1. Don’t just think native. Think natural.
2. Create networks of sensibility that
allow “native” content to scale across
addressable audiences.
3. Put ambition, creativity, transparency,
and value before everything else.

34. “And I … I want
to thank you—
for giving me
the best day of
my life.”

35. Any questions?