Consumers who use Yahoo Mail got a pleasant surprise recently: a Pottery Barn ad that let them use augmented reality to see what their potential new furniture would look like in their home -- an experience more impactful and fun than traditional display ads. The brand was taking advantage of Verizon Media's strength in native advertising. (Native is broadly defined as advertising content that looks and works like other content in the place it appears.)

Verizon Media’s digital programming unit, formerly known as Oath, had its Digital Content NewFronts turn last Tuesday evening -- amid the recent start of parent Verizon’s rollout of 5G signal transmission capability for smartphones across the country.  Anyone attending with thoughts that Verizon would use this event to demonstrate early applications of 5G in content were not disappointed.

The recent Jack Myers TomorrowToday report suggests that the long-awaited "hockey stick of growth" for interactive/VOD/addressable TV advertising will kick in in 2019, growing to some $3 billion by 2020 and continuing to accelerate.  This bullish vision is certainly shared by Brett Hurwitz (pictured above), Oath's Business Lead for Advanced Television, whose team represents Verizon's Fios addressable offering.