Native Advertising Trends Shaping 2015
The developments that pushed native advertising forward in 2015, from Snapchat Discover to the first FTC guidance on disclosure.
Native advertising had spent a couple of years proving itself on individual publisher sites. In 2015 it started becoming a standard line item across a much wider set of platforms, driven by a handful of specific developments.
Ad blocking made native look like the safer bet
Apple’s decision to allow content-blocking extensions in Safari on iOS 9, arriving in the fall of 2015, put ad blocking directly in front of hundreds of millions of mobile users for the first time. Standard display and banner formats were the most affected. Native units, built into the content stream itself rather than served as a separate blockable element, suddenly looked like a meaningfully more durable format, and budgets shifted accordingly.
Snapchat Discover opened a new native lane
Snapchat launched Discover in January 2015, giving publishers a dedicated channel to run native content, including sponsored placements, in front of a young, largely mobile-only audience that traditional publishers were struggling to reach elsewhere. It was a new distribution channel for native content, not just another version of the sponsored-post format already running on BuzzFeed or Forbes.
Instagram widened access to its ad platform
Instagram had run ads for select brands since late 2013, but 2015 was the year it opened its advertising API more broadly, letting far more advertisers buy native-feeling, in-feed placements at scale rather than through a limited manual sales process. That expansion mattered specifically for native advertising because Instagram’s format, a photo in a feed of photos, was native by design in a way banner-based platforms had to work harder to replicate.
Programmatic native started to scale
Buying native placements had mostly meant direct deals with individual publishers through 2013 and 2014. In 2015, exchanges and DSPs began supporting programmatic buying of native ad units at real scale, letting advertisers run native creative across many publishers through a single buy rather than negotiating placement by placement. This traded some of native’s early editorial-fit advantage for reach and efficiency.
Regulators started drawing clearer lines
The Federal Trade Commission issued its first formal guidance on native advertising disclosure in December 2015, giving the industry, for the first time, an actual regulatory reference point rather than just evolving industry norms. Advertisers and publishers who had already been disclosing clearly had little to change; those who’d been pushing the boundary of what counted as adequate disclosure had a much clearer line to stay on the right side of.
What this added up to
By the end of 2015, native advertising had grown past its original home on a handful of premium publisher sites into a format running across social feeds, messaging platforms and programmatic exchanges, with real regulatory guardrails starting to take shape around it. The core discipline, content worth the reader’s time, clearly labeled, hadn’t changed. What changed was how many places that discipline now needed to be applied.
More from Paid Advertising, the 2015 archive or the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
