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Most B2B marketers think native advertising is a 2016 relic: sponsored listicles, “you won’t believe” thumbnails, the stuff that gave content marketing a bad name. That’s the wrong belief to carry through H2 2026. Native never went away. It went quiet, there was a major shakeout of adtech vendors, it matured to live alongside display rather than being pre-occupied with killing it, and it’s now resurfacing in B2B media plans with a signal layer underneath it that didn’t exist the first time around.
I’ve got a personal stake in saying this. I built PowerLinks around native, B2B and contextual adtech, back when the whole industry was trying to solve banner fatigue.
The OG premise was strong. The internet has morphed fast from desktop devices to mobiles, and banner ads didn’t really fit on mobile sized screens. Web pages, across both desktop and mobile were increasingly getting splashed in prodigious volumes all over the pages, causing breaking, ads covering content and the proliferation of video formats, many of which interrupted the content - was all driving users away. Pages were loading slow, and the web was starting to look like a dumpster truck of competing ‘impact formats’.
Native promised something different. Where display ads won attention by standing out, native ads won attention by blending in. Where display ads were typically only aligned to users by audience signals (think retargeting), native had a greater requirement to align more contextually to the topic of the page because the ad looked like any other story in the publishers news feed. Native also stood to align the approach taken on social platforms like Facebook and Linkedin - ads that looked like any other posts, using titles, images or videos and other assets that populated to look like they belonged. They were, and are, hard to visually skip.
A lot of these points remain as true today as they were around 2015. V1 didn’t scale but V2 just might.
I personally stepped out of native specifically around 2020, when I went all in on B2B and broader programmatic through FunnelFuel. Watching it come back, this time with account-level signal underneath it, is the closest thing adtech gets to a sequel that’s actually better than the original. This is personally interesting, and maybe this format can be weaponised properly this time around with some next gen thinking - which I will dive into below
What you’ll learn in this piece:
What native advertising actually is, and the real difference between advertorial-style native and programmatic in-feed native
Why native faded from view after its first wave, and what’s changed structurally since
Why B2B specifically is the environment where signal-aware native has the best shot at working
How an account graph turns a generic native placement into an account-targeted one, and what that requires technically
How to measure it properly, and where it fits alongside rich media display rather than instead of it
WTF is “native advertising”?
Native advertising is any ad format built to match the look, feel, and function of the environment it sits in, rather than interrupting it. That’s the whole definition. Everything else is a variation on how far that blending goes and believe me, people in native will spend plenty of time arguing over that.
below is an example of a native in-feed format, ringed in red. Notice how the shape and size of the image, the colours and fonts, and general website styling is broadly adhered to. In order to really highlight the value, did you even notice the 300x250 MPU in the top right hand corner and call out it is a Dell ad? if not, that is kinda the point here.
There are two broad versions worth separating, because B2B marketers tend to conflate them.
Advertorial-style native is editorial-shaped sponsored content: a branded article, a “presented by” feature, something written to read like the publication’s own journalism. It’s bought directly with a publisher, it’s slow to produce, and it doesn’t scale past a handful of placements at a time. It has genuine value for brand storytelling with a specific title or publication, but it’s not a media buying strategy. IMO, it is best used to seed premium memory building content and to ensure you have amplification rights - because this stuff gets really powerful when you can promote the story. Think about that above example on Entrepreneur. The advertiser is PayPal for business. PayPal could promote that story around how to attract more customers using Entrepreneur magazine as the advertiser, driving reads within their premium website. The win is hijacking trust in a way that a banner click to a vendor site can’t replicate
Programmatic in-feed native is the format I care about, because it’s the one with scale and signal. These are ad units auctioned through exchanges like TripleLift and StackAdapt, served through a DSP, and designed to sit inside a content feed, a recommendation widget, or an article layout as a component: image, headline, short description, and a call to action, styled to match the host page rather than sitting on top of it as a foreign object.
The distinction matters because only the second version can be targeted, measured, and scaled the way a B2B media plan needs it to be.
Why native faded, and why that’s the wrong lesson to take from it
Native’s first wave was a response to banner blindness. Standard display had raced CPMs toward the bottom, and readers had learned to stop seeing bright, boxed-in ad units entirely. Native’s pitch was the opposite of standard display’s logic: instead of standing out through size and motion, stand out by blending in. A well-built native unit, with the right image and title working together, earns a moment of attention that a banner in the sidebar never gets a chance at. Good creative can then rapidly anchor brand memory to context - which is psychologically compelling.
Native didn’t replace display, and it was never going to. What actually happened is more interesting: display was built around audience targeting, following a person across sites based on who they were assumed to be, while native’s contextual roots meant it was better suited to matching content, not chasing identity. When the entire industry’s targeting foundation started shifting away from identity (think the death of the cookie and the growing net being cast by privacy regs globally), native’s original strength turned out to be the one built for what came next.
That shift is not theoretical anymore. More than three-quarters of global internet traffic now runs through environments where third-party cookies are limited or unavailable, and behavioural targeting depends on signals that are disappearing faster than most budgets have adjusted to. Google’s own reversal on Chrome cookie deprecation hasn’t changed the practical picture much: Safari and Firefox already block third-party cookies by default, and Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework has already collapsed most mobile-side signal availability. Contextual targeting isn’t the fallback option anymore. For a growing share of the open web, it’s the only option that still works cleanly.
Below is how I’d choose native placements for a B2B plan, and how I’d split budget between native and display.