Digital advertising has long wrestled with a persistent challenge, as audiences increasingly ignore online adverts. For South African startup Naritive, this gap between advertising spend and audience engagement became the catalyst for innovation.
Founded by Rafiq Phillips and Nicolas Van Zyl, the company set out to redesign how display advertising works by making ads interactive rather than passive.
What began as a prototype in Johannesburg in early 2024 has since evolved into a platform now used by more than 100 brands and agencies spanning Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the United States.
Phillips’ experience managing search marketing and digital campaigns for MTN South Africa exposed a recurring industry pain point: conventional display ads were consistently underperforming. Discussions with agency partners revealed deeper concerns around creative fatigue, declining engagement, and limited opportunities for audience participation.
From campaign frustration to product innovation
Drawing on his information technology background from Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Phillips says he began experimenting with alternative ad experiences. Within days, a working prototype emerged, followed by a full platform launch three months later.
Around the same period, Naritive secured private funding exceeding the threshold required for participation in the Google for Startups programme, providing early validation and access to resources that supported product refinement.
Naritive positions itself as an adtech platform enabling brands and agencies to deploy interactive advertising across the open web, including publisher environments outside social media platforms. Campaigns can be launched through demand-side platforms such as Google DV360.
The company’s two primary offerings, which are Ad Stories and Ad Social, reimagine display advertising as immersive experiences rather than static placements. Instead of simple banners, these formats allow audiences to interact directly within ad units through features such as polls, quizzes, scratch-to-reveal promotions, live product browsing, and calendar integrations.
Such functionality enables brands to consolidate multiple engagement actions within a single ad environment while also generating detailed analytics on user behaviour and interaction patterns.
Turning ads into experiences
For clients seeking a full-service approach, Naritive provides in-house creative design, campaign setup, and performance management through its ad operations team.
Meanwhile, agencies and brands preferring autonomy can adopt the platform’s white-label SaaS model, allowing internal teams to build, customise, and deploy interactive campaigns independently.
“The fact that we have repeat business remains one of the strongest performance indicators. Because clients return with new campaigns; it shows we have satisfied users,” Phillips says. “Some of the unique features and functionality that we do have is not available in other forms of display advertising.”
The company is also piloting an embedded lead-generation capability that enables users to submit contact details directly within an advert, automatically feeding that information into client CRM systems and streamlining conversion pathways.
A focused revenue model anchored in ad spend
Naritive’s commercial strategy centres exclusively on technology fees tied to advertising expenditure. In South Africa, SaaS clients pay a CPM technology fee of approximately 40 rand, while managed service clients incur fees ranging between 120 and 140 rand CPM.
Since launching commercially in 2024, the startup reports raising more than $500,000 in funding and generating roughly $2.5 million in revenue.
A team of about 30 employees supports operations spanning multiple regions, with repeat business emerging as a key performance indicator of client satisfaction and product effectiveness.
Measuring attention as a competitive differentiator
Naritive’s central value proposition rests on measurable engagement gains. The company says its technology has undergone independent verification by Lumen Research, a firm specialising in attention analytics through eye-tracking methodologies.
According to Naritive, the evaluation indicated stronger brand recall compared with traditional display advertising, alongside click-through rates exceeding typical industry benchmarks defined by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
Beyond direct campaign metrics, the startup reports that brands using its formats often experience uplift across other marketing channels, including search and direct traffic, suggesting broader brand awareness effects linked to interactive advertising.
Although Naritive’s engineering and product teams remain based in Johannesburg, the company has established a geographically distributed sales presence, including operations in the United Kingdom, enabling access to international clients.
Its growth trajectory illustrates a broader trend of African-built software products achieving cross-border adoption, particularly in sectors where digital innovation addresses universal challenges such as attention scarcity.
The next phase: AI and connected TV
Looking ahead, Naritive is expanding its platform capabilities beyond web advertising. The startup is developing artificial intelligence features aimed at enhancing creative generation, campaign optimisation, and performance insights.
In parallel, Naritive is exploring connected TV advertising formats and smart-TV ad creation tools, positioning the platform to participate in the rapidly growing CTV market while extending its interactive philosophy into new media environments.
As digital advertising continues to evolve amid declining engagement with conventional formats, Naritive’s approach reflects a broader industry shift towards participatory experiences, signalling that the future of display advertising may lie less in visibility alone and more in interaction.
Talking Points
It is encouraging to see how Naritive is rethinking digital advertising by prioritising engagement rather than impressions, directly addressing the long-standing challenge of banner blindness that has limited the effectiveness of display ads.
By transforming static placements into interactive experiences, Naritive is helping brands move beyond passive visibility to active audience participation, creating campaigns that feel more like content than advertising.
The platform’s ability to embed polls, quizzes, product browsing, and promotional interactions within a single ad unit reflects a thoughtful response to evolving consumer behaviour, where attention is earned through experience rather than interruption.
At Techparley, we see solutions like Naritive’s as part of a broader shift in marketing technology, where African startups are not just adapting global trends but actively shaping how digital engagement evolves across markets.
Its early traction across multiple continents highlights the growing credibility of African-built adtech solutions on the global stage, reinforcing confidence in the region’s capacity to export sophisticated digital infrastructure.
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