As Advertising Week Europe gets into full swing in London, native advertising is undoubtedly the talk of the town. Our own UK representative, Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile, couldn’t make it across the pond to attend, but he did sit down yesterday with the Media Briefing to talk about the question on everyone’s minds: Does this newfangled native advertising content work?

For some advertisers, he says, yes. But Tony adds in the sit-down interview: “Right now, though, we’re in a situation where the vast majority of what we’re seeing is underperforming in terms of what an advertiser’s actual goals are. If you’re wanting to get your content in front of an audience, a specific audience, and have them engage with that content in the way they would engage with normal content, then a lot of native advertising is missing the mark.”

And that’s backed up by the data, too, as outlined in Tony’s recent article in Time:

On a typical article two-thirds of people exhibit more than 15 seconds of engagement, on native ad content that plummets to around one-third. You see the same story when looking at page-scrolling behavior. On the native ad content we analyzed, only 24% of visitors scrolled down the page at all, compared with 71% for normal content. If they do stick around and scroll down the page, fewer than one-third of those people will read beyond the first one-third of the article.

Here’s a two-minute clip from the interview:

You can check out the full video interview at www.themediabriefing.com.