LONDON — It’s only natural that native advertising articles exist only on the websites of the individual publishers who sell and create them – after all, they depend on the tone and content production skillset boasted by that publisher.

But Danny Hopwood wants native’s small reach to break out of their creators’ own confines, with the power of programmatic trading.

“That’s what we’ve been waiting for – an ability to have a platform to buy native ads on,” says the EMEA head of platform at VivaKi’s Audience On Demand unit. “We don’t want to go back to the past time of having an IO (manual insertion order) here and an IO there, and a (phone) call there and a (phone) call there to buy a group of native ads that aren’t going to drive real scale.

“We want platforms, we want programatic, we want an ability to buy audiences, all in one platform, all in one place, across many different publishers.”

We spoke with Hopwood as part of our series titled “The Road to Cannes,” a preview of the Festival and an overview on the state and future of digital media by a range of thought leaders. The series will be published over the next four weeks.  The series is sponsored by Videology.