Xaxis bets big on native naming Nicolas Bidon as Plista CEO ahead of global rollout
Native advertising is forecast as one of the large growth areas in the digital advertising space, and Group M’s ad tech hub Xaxis has today (12 April) underlined its intention to take advantage of this trend by announcing that Plista will sit within its specialist ad tech Xaxis.
A little over two years after purchasing Germany-based Plista, WPP is now positioning Plista as a native ad specialist and placed it within its programmatic advertising specialist unit Xaxis, with Nicolas Bidon, formerly UK managing director of Xaxis, has now named as its global CEO of Plista.
In addition, Plista has also announced the launch of a Thailand office, increasing its global presence to 11 markets across Europe and Asia, plus its intention to launch in the US later this year.
Advertisers will now be able to buy native ad units using programmatic ad units - including in-feed, outstream video, recommendation widgets and in-ad native formats – using the Plista informed by audience data from Xaxis’ DMP Turbine.
This lets advertisers to better target their native content more effectively because they will know more about the interests, intents and consumer path of the audiences viewing the content, according to Bidon, who was previously managing director, UK of Xaxis, Light Reaction and Plista.
He added: “By leveraging Turbine data across the Plista platform we’re offering a powerful way for advertisers to programmatically engage with their target audiences via well accepted native formats.”
Xaxis claims the new offering is the first to bring the personalisation benefits of audience data to a broad portfolio of native formats, allowing advertisers to conduct campaigns using native ad formats at scale.
By leveraging Plista’s premium publisher network and Xaxis’ publisher relationships, plista provides access to more premium native formats than any other provider with a significant reach across desktop and mobile, according to Bidon.
He added: “The combination of Plista and Xaxis’ Turbine gives an opportunity to bring the scale and targeting benefits of programmatic to native formats, which tend to drive more engagement than traditional standard IAB display formats since they are usually better integrated with content.
“Today, native is a very exciting but still a nascent and fragmented space. We're addressing this in several ways. Plista is aiming to bring scale to both advertisers and publishers and to be a one stop shop for native formats - content recommendation, out stream video, in-feed etc.”