Xaxis has revealed it is looking to tap into the growing native advertising market with a new ‘programmatic native’ platform.

The platform is being launched in partnership with plista, a little-known native ad specialist based in Germany that WPP acquired in 2014. Plista becomes part of the Xaxis portfolio.

Xaxis claims that the new offering will allow advertisers to buy native ads programmatically, across in-feed, outstream video, recommendation widgets and in-ad native formats. The buying decisions will be informed by data from Xaxis’ data management platform Turbine.

To support the platform, plista is being relaunched as an international business. Xaxis’ UK managing director Nicolas Bidon takes over as global chief executive, and plista is opening a new office in Thailand, taking it up to 11 markets globally.

“By leveraging Turbine data across the plista platform we’re offering a powerful way for advertisers to programmatically engage with their target audiences via well accepted native formats,” said Bidon, a former EMEA director of brand display at Yahoo.

“It’s the first single source solution for running native campaigns, at scale, and in coordination with advertisers’ existing digital spend.”

Xaxis global CEO Brian Gleason added: “[Bidon] has played a key role in the development of Xaxis in the UK market and brings a wealth of product and technical expertise to the plista global CEO position. We look forward to his leadership in growing the plista business as we continue to bring Turbine data to new environments and advertising categories