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In a media landscape saturated with display fatigue and social ad sameness, Nadim Kuttab sees an overlooked opportunity hiding in plain sight.
“Most big brands treat it like a reach channel, not a performance one,” says Nadim, CEO and co-founder of Xevio. “But if you use it right, native can scale your business in ways search and social never could.”
Nadim would know. In the past year alone, Xevio helped two brands—a major insurance company and a small shoe brand—grow to nine-figure revenue using native ads as the core of their user acquisition strategy. They did it not by relying on walled gardens or glossy awareness plays but by turning native into a direct response engine.
From affiliate roots to enterprise scale
Nadim cut his teeth in affiliate marketing before co-founding Xevio in 2023 with five fellow native ad veterans, several of whom are former Taboola insiders.
“We’ve built a team with an unmatched level of competitive intelligence,” he explains. “There’s no other agency that combines this kind of performance mindset with firsthand experience from inside the traffic sources themselves.”
And while native has long been a playground for affiliates and arbitrage specialists, Xevio's sights are set much higher.
“Our biggest projects today are with enterprise brands — 100,000+ employee companies,” Nadim says. “These are brands with the budgets and ambitions to unlock native at scale, but they haven’t cracked the model yet. That’s where we come in.”
What most marketers get wrong about native
According to Nadim, the biggest mistake brands make is assuming native will work just like Meta or Google — copy-pasting creative and expecting similar returns.
“They’ll burn thousands of dollars and walk away saying native doesn’t work,” he says. “But the truth is, they’re not treating it like a native experience.”
Xevio’s approach is radically different. Every campaign starts with the product — dissecting the economics, defining realistic goals, and building a funnel from scratch. One recent e-commerce case involved more than 100 landing pages and dozens of product iterations, all tested and optimized to perfection.
“We write long-form advertorials. We create content experiences that feel natural on the open web. We warm people up — and then we close.”
Performance at its core: Direct response at scale
While many still see native as a mid-funnel or branding tool, Nadiminsists it's time to update that playbook.
“What we do is direct response marketing — not six months down the line, but in the same session,” he explains. “A user sees the ad, reads the content, and takes action — buys the product, signs up, enters the funnel. That’s what excites me.”
Native, when built correctly, becomes a revenue machine: “If you do it right, you’re putting in $1 and getting $2 out.”
Why now is the moment to invest in native
Nadim is bullish on the timing. Between publishers seeking cleaner, brand-friendly monetization and increased competition on social platforms, he believes native is entering a new era — one that rewards early movers.
“There’s a massive opportunity right now for brands to claim their space in native,” he says. “If you build your system early, your competitors won’t be able to catch up.”
And the results speak for themselves. One shoe brand scaled from under $3 million in revenue to nine figures in a single year, with a substantial chunk attributed directly to native ads — a growth story Nadimstill finds mind-blowing.
“It was a two-man operation when we started,” he recalls. “Now imagine what Nike could do with this approach.”
Making native feel native — even with performance goals
Does all this performance focus come at the cost of native’s original charm — relevance, subtlety, storytelling?
Not at all, says Nadim. It’s what makes the approach work.
“We’re not pushing hard sells,” he explains. “We’re building interest. When I was working on HelloFresh, my team didn't say ‘buy now.’ We said, ‘There’s a way to cook at home without going to the supermarket and saving money.’ That resonates.”
By tapping into curiosity and delivering useful, engaging content, Xevio can compete with — and sometimes outperform — branded search.
“You’re taking cold traffic and warming them up with high-intent stories. It’s like alchemy for marketers.”
At Native Advertising Days 2025 you can witness Nadim and his colleagues break down what they do — from product selection to full-funnel systems, and learn how they plan on cracking a quarter of a billion in annual spend on native channels.
Want to hear more? Join Nadim Kuttab at Native Advertising Days 2025 in London.
