Native Advertising

Native Advertising

Reviewed by Faisal Zaidi

Native advertising is advertising built to match the form and function of the editorial content around it, so that it passes the reader's ordinary scepticism rather than triggering it. The pitch is that it is less annoying than a banner. The mechanism measured in the research is that it works because most readers cannot tell it is an advertisement. The term is credited to the venture capitalist Fred Wilson, speaking at the OMMA Global conference in 2011, though the practice, as advertorials and brand-published magazines, is a great deal older.

What it is

The format's modern form was built at BuzzFeed, whose sponsored listicles for Toyota spread fast enough that both the New York Times and Condé Nast adopted the approach. Jonah Peretti called the shift a golden age of advertising. Andrew Sullivan's rebuttal is the sharper line, that the sponsored-content model is designed to obscure the old line as much as possible. Tim Wu treats the collapse of the wall between editorial and advertising as the low point of the open web, the moment the thing that made web content trustworthy was sold for reach.

In effect

What makes the format a research subject rather than a complaint is that its central claim is testable and has been tested. Two nationally representative United States samples found fewer than one in ten readers recognising a sponsored article as paid, and the experimental literature has mapped which disclosure positions and wordings change that. Recognition then has consequences, lowering perceptions of article quality, attitude to the sponsor and intention to share, and lowering the reader's opinion of the publisher as well.

What it does not say

It is not the mechanism James Williams has in mind when he argues that advertising went from the exception to the rule. He raises native advertising by name precisely in order to set it aside, because his claim is about instrumentation rather than camouflage, so the recognition literature argues with him rather than supporting him. This page is also not a source for any recognition rate: it is a note about a format and a business practice, and every number belongs to the experimental literature it points at. And the term is not Wu's, though his book is where most readers meet the case.

Sources

  1. Wu, T. (2016). The Attention Merchants. The BuzzFeed and Toyota case, Peretti's "golden age of advertising" line and Sullivan's rebuttal, all at p. 326, reported from the book and not re-checked.
  2. Wojdynski, B. W., & Evans, N. J. (2016). "Going Native: Effects of Disclosure Position and Language on the Recognition and Evaluation of Online Native Advertising." Journal of Advertising, 45(2), 157-168. doi:10.1080/00913367.2015.1115380. Cite this literature, and not this page, for any claim about recognition rates.
  3. Amazeen, M. A., & Wojdynski, B. W. (2020). "The effects of disclosure format on native advertising recognition and audience perceptions of legacy and online news publishers." Journalism, 21(12), 1965-1984. doi:10.1177/1464884918754829.
  4. Williams, J. (2018). Stand Out of Our Light. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108453004. Chapter 5, where native advertising is named and set aside.
  5. Attribution of the term to Fred Wilson, OMMA Global, 2011, recorded in the vault's review of 25 September 2026, which also corrected an earlier attribution to Wu.