Ryan Skinner says, “In the context of writing a report on the native advertising technology landscape, I was looking at many publishers’ native advertising products when it occurred to me:

Nobody uses the same damn name for native ads, no one calls it ‘advertising’, and almost no one calls it ‘native’.

Here’s a word cloud of all the names used for native advertising products by 20 leading publishing houses .

Not a single name for this product was repeated publisher to publisher.

Let me repeat that:

Not a single name for this product was repeated publisher to publisher.

Now, I get branding. Ford’s not going to name their new car Chevy. But this isn’t branding. Chevy and Ford can both agree that the Mustang and the Camaro are, in fact, cars. Ford doesn’t call its cars Frisbees, and Chevy doesn’t call them PersonTransporters, and think they’re competing in wildly different markets”.

Just Don’t Call It Native Advertising

Forrester

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