Tech Innovation like Attention-First Marketing with South African Roots

“We live in an economy where people scroll faster than they breathe, and traditional advertising metrics just don’t reflect how real consumers behave anymore,” says Nicolas van Zyl, Founder and CEO of Naritive. “Attention-first marketing is about designing content and formats that actually earn someone’s interest and not just reach their screen. It’s marketing that respects the fact that attention is the real currency, not impressions.”

Naritive was born out of frustration and a desire to build something better. It’s a purpose-driven ad agency that started as a performance marketing agency called NXD. “We were working across some of Africa’s biggest media accounts. But we kept running into the same wall: our media strategies were solid, our targeting was sharp, but the formats just weren’t doing the job. Display ads were getting ignored, and clients didn’t value a service operating in a saturated market of digital performance marketing agencies,” he shares. “So we did something different.”

The new approach meant that the brand stopped outsourcing innovation and started building it themselves. “That’s how we created Ad Stories: a dynamic, interactive, story-like format that lives inside the display ecosystem. Then came Ad Social, which lets you take real social media posts and repurpose them as high-performing ads across the web. There is more to touch on, but while some of the ideas are not wholly original, we felt like we could do them better,” Van Zyl elaborates. “We built our own platform (The Nat1ve Platform) to power it all.”

Today, Naritive is a growing adtech company, headquartered in Africa, serving clients across South Africa, Kenya, the UK, the US, and beyond. “We’re not importing solutions and technology, we are a proud South African export.”

Turning Advertising Upside-down

Van Zyl believes that Naritive has turned display advertising on its head. “We got tired of generic banner ads that get ignored, so we built interactive formats from scratch: Ad Stories and Ad Social. These look and feel more like the content people actually consume. Think: Instagram Stories or social posts, but they live on the open web, are fully programmatic, and actually invite interaction.

While others are still serving static rectangles, Naritive is building scroll-stopping ad experiences that mimic how people already engage and then back it with proper analytics.

“Display isn’t dead. It’s just been boring. We’re here to fix that.”

According to Van Zyl, display advertising remains one of the most scalable, cost-efficient ways to reach an audience, but reach or clicks alone isn’t enough anymore. “What brands need now are formats that cut through noise, create moments that matter, and deliver results that aren’t just visible, but valuable. Display still reaches the world, it just needs to evolve to make the investment worth it.”

Every brand needs to invest in the right formats. “The ones that respect people’s attention, feel native to the environment, and move the needle in real, measurable ways.”

Advice for SMEs to Adopt Attention-First Marketing

Van Zyl shares three tips for SMEs who want to adopt attention-first marketing

Design like a content creator, not an advertiser. If you wouldn’t watch, tap, or read your own ad, why would anyone else?

Measure what actually matters. Look at dwell time, engagement, tap-throughs, not just reach or CTR. Attention tells you if your story landed. Everything else is noise.

Treat every campaign like an experience. It’s not about forcing people to see something, it’s about giving them a reason to lean in. Use interaction, movement, relevance, and narrative to make your ad something they want to engage with, not just something they scroll past.

“Attention-first marketing means moving toward a multi-touchpoint perspective on measuring whether an ad is doing a get job of getting your message across: dwell time, interaction, engagement, and emotional response. Because the truth is, if your ad didn’t stop them, didn’t hold them, didn’t move them, it probably didn’t work,” he concludes.