Native Advertising: The Old Is New Again

"Native advertising" is generally defined as advertiser-sponsored content that is designed for compatibility with the editorial content in which it is placed. There is a diverse array of native advertising formats and techniques, including: (1) custom content (which may be written by the publisher or written by the brand in partnership with the publisher); (2) content that appears in-feed (such as a promoted tweet on Twitter or content in a publisher's "top news" feed); and (3) content that appears in a recommendation "widget" placed on a publisher's site. Numerous other forms of native advertising also exist, and additional forms are certain to be developed in the coming years.

Although there has been a growing focus on native advertising by regulatory and self-regulatory bodies, native advertising is anything but new. Moreover, during the past decades, regulators and self-regulators have brought enforcement actions challenging ads that, in the regulators' and