• South African entrepreneur Nicolas van Zyl founded Naritive in 2021 to redesign digital advertising around social media behaviors.
• Naritive develops interactive formats such as Ad Stories and Ad Social to increase attention, engagement and message recall.
• Van Zyl combines a legal background with senior roles in media agencies and esports governance.

Nicolas van Zyl is a trained lawyer and a South African entrepreneur. He founded and now leads Naritive, an international company specializing in digital advertising.

Founded in 2021 under the name NXD, Naritive supports brands in designing advertising experiences that are more engaging, interactive and visible online. The company moves away from traditional advertising formats, which users often ignore, and instead develops creations inspired by social media usage. These formats aim to capture attention, drive interaction and strengthen message recall.

Naritive develops several advertising formats. The first, Ad Stories, mirrors the structure and visual language of popular social media stories and delivers them as interactive and immersive advertisements. Another format, Ad Social, converts content already published on social media into advertisements distributed across the wider web while preserving original interaction mechanisms.

In addition, the company offers The Naritive Platform, an advertising platform that centralizes the creation, management and deployment of these formats. The platform provides tools that convert visual or social content into interactive ads, integrate features such as polls, clickable areas or animations, and distribute campaigns across multiple digital environments.

Alongside his work at Naritive, Nicolas van Zyl serves as partner and non-executive director at Mettlestate, a leading esports and gaming company in South Africa.

He graduated from the University of Cape Town, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English, history and philosophy in 2012, a bachelor’s degree in law in 2015 and a master’s degree in human rights law in 2017.

In 2017, he joined Mercurial Media, an advertising company, as an intern and later became digital campaign manager. In 2018, he joined Nettrade Programmatic, a media solutions agency, where he successively held roles as head of advertising operations and head of performance. In 2020, he continued his career at OMD Worldwide South Africa as head of digital accounts.

This article was initially published in French by Melchior Koba

Adapted in English by Ange J.A de BERRY QUENUM