You’ve surely seen native ads before, right? They look like the content you encounter frequently on the web, such as articles, polls or even long-form interviews you loved on your favourite internet publisher’s website. A company called Polar.Me helps publishers you love, such as Forbes, AOL and Slate, serve native ads that “look and feel like editorial content” to readers – to you. So far, Polar.Me’s MediaVoice has served over 8 billion native ads on more than 700 websites, including the Huffington Post and Forbes.com!

With advertisers wanting to invest more and more into native advertising, the market needs solutions that help publishers meet the demand. While some companies such as Vox Media build their own in-house ad serving technology, others need help from Polar.Me to “supercharge” their native ads. How? First you need to know the story behind Polar…Mobile!

Mobile…Then Native-First

Toronto-based Polar.Me actually started as Polar Mobile, building apps for large media companies and securing more than $9 million of investment, with a $6 million dollar round led by growth equity firm Georgian Partners. At the time, Polar announced a product called MediaEverywhere, a HTM5-based content distribution solution for smartphones and tablets.

However, Polar.Me saw that most of its customers were interested in the native ad part of their platform and pivoted to meet the demand. MediaVoice, as it is now called, allows companies to both create and track their native ads, an ever increasing source of income for both large and small publishers.

Integration As Essential As Your CMS

Polar.Me’s “secret sauce” is integration. For creating native ads, MediaVoice integrates with a publisher’s CMS, such as WordPress – in order to publish the article in question easily. In addition to text-based content, Polar.Me supports images and videos as well.

To serve ads across both computers and mobile devices, MediaVoice integrates with a publisher’s ad server, a piece of software that usually shows ads such as banners to targeted user groups. For now, it supports Google Doubleclick (DFP=, 24/7, Mocean, Adtech, OpenX and FreeWheel, all very popular ad serves among today’s publishers.

In the case of native advertising, MediaVoice “serves” content such as articles to the same targeted group. What this means is that advertising campaigns can include both display ads (such as banners) as well as native ads.

In order to have the solution “look and feel like editorial content” as the company stated the product’s mission to be, an unlimited number of MediaVoice’s ad units can be added to a website and then customised through HTML and CSS.

In essence, Polar.Me wants to combine the best of the ad serving and content creation world to enhance native ads, such as the ability to serve multiple creatives in the same piece of native advertising. “Normal” content management systems, such as WordPress, don’t usually give publishers this ability right out of the box.

Polar.Me CEO Kunal Gupta told Techcrunch that having a platform for publishers is just part of the challenge, as the company wants to make sure that readers (and in the case of video content viewers”) never look at the content that MediaVoice serves as ads:

For the user, native advertising has to look and feel like content for them to engage, and what’s happening today is the publisher’s treating it like a piece of content, like they do editorial content, as well as the advertisers treating it like content,” he said. “What needs to happen for it to actually scale is that the publisher and the advertiser need to think of it as an ad, and the user needs to think of it as content.

Unlike some other companies we’ve written about, Polar.Me’s MediaVoice isn’t for everyone. It’s a premium solution that will fit the needs of publishers that can use its benefits to increase their bottom line. To try it, you’ll have to request a demo and contact Polar.Me to see if MediaVoice is the right fit for your native ads needs!