South African startup Naritive is fixing banner blindness with interactive advertising

After seeing how easily people ignore online ads, these founders built a platform that lets brands create interactive ad experiences across the web.

Digital advertising has long struggled with a simple problem: people ignore ads. Banner blindness, low engagement, and declining click-through rates have forced brands to rethink how they connect with audiences online.

That blind-spot behaviour, where users scroll, skim, or ignore ads, doesn’t just frustrate marketers; it eats into budgets and undermines performance. For the founders of Naritive, that contrast between cost and attention sparked a bigger question: what if ads were built for engagement?

What started as a prototype in Johannesburg in early 2024 has since become a platform used by more than 100 brands and agencies across Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the United States.

The ad problem that inspired Naritive

Before Naritive existed, its founders, Rafiq Phillips and Nicolas Van Zyl, were entrenched in digital marketing.

While managing search marketing and digital campaigns for MTN South Africa, including overseeing SEO and Google Ads, Phillips encountered a recurring pain point that many marketers dread: standard display ads were underperforming. Conversations with agency partners revealed deeper issues surrounding engagement, creative fatigue, and an inability to capture audience attention meaningfully.

“I realised I could build something that solves this,” Phillips, Narrative’s CTO, recalls, drawing on his background in information technology and software development from Cape Peninsula University of Technology.

A few days of tinkering produced a prototype. Three months later, version 1.0 of the Naritive platform was live. Coincidentally, as he was preparing to quit MTN during a restructuring, Naritive secured private funding beyond the required threshold for participation in the Google Startups programme, an early validation and resource boost.

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What Naritive actually does and how it works

At its core, Naritive is an ad tech platform that allows brands and agen...