The banner is dying. It has served us well, but after two decades in the spotlight, its time is coming. Don’t get me wrong, banner ads continue to be extremely effective, but something has arrived that aims to blow banner out of the water. Welcome, Native.

Native advertising has been around since the early days of print media. They are ads that read like content, an advertorial. They have just arrived on the digital scene in the past two years, and unlike banner ads, which surround the content, Native advertising is a part of user’s stream.  Their ability to look, act and feel like the content around them, allows the reader to digest them as content rather than an interrupter of content. Native’s ability to integrate with a user’s experience, in any online environment, is one reason this ad type is poised to explode.

Right now around 75% of U.S. website publishers offer Native advertising, and only 10% say they have no plans to add Native this year. But, like in the early days of the banner ad, Native ads, by and large, are purchased through direct buys with each individual website publisher. This makes it tedious and expensive to purchase inventory, but banner ads enjoy vast scale because of Programmatic exchange-based buying. Programmatic allows marketers to evaluate and buy inventory from millions of websites in an instant. In addition to scale, Programmatic allows precise impression-by-impression targeting, to ensure marketers are only buying space to be seen by the prospects that really matter to their brand.

Now, Native has started to go Programmatic. This positions Native to become one of the most ubiquitous and popular types of digital ads in the years to come.

Grapeseed Media is a beta member of one of the first Programmatic marketplaces for Native. This market has access to over 4 billion units monthly across thousands of publishers. We took this new tool for a test drive to see what all the excitement was about and we weren’t disappointed.  While our average banner ads have a click-through-rate (CTR) of .13%, our first Native campaigns have an average CTR of .49%. That is a very promising figure, but clicks aren’t everything. We’ve also seen a corresponding lift in landing page visits and most importantly return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) rose by 1/3 over our banner campaigns to 588%.

These early numbers have gotten us excited for the future of Native advertising. Business Insider says that 1 out every 6 dollars spent on digital advertising will go to Native by 2020. If the number of publishers that join the Programmatic marketplace grow fast enough and these excellent results continue, we think Business Insider’s predication may be low.

Welcome to Programmatic, Native. We are glad to have you.

Bill Updegraff is will be providing one-to-one coaching on the topic Do You Hear the People Click? Join the Programmatic Revolution & Make Your Digital Marketing Les(s) Miserable during the National Arts Marketing Project Conference 2015. REGISTER before end of day today, 10/23!