• by Sloan Gaon , March 17, 2016

In December, the FTC released an enforcement policy statement and a business guidefor native advertising, providing more detail on the popular ad delivery mechanism than the agency had previously undertaken.

While the topic has slipped from the headlines since then, native advertising’s growth is not slowing, with recent studies forecasting spending will double in some markets over the next five years.

That growth has many players in the digital advertising space concerned over a possible infringement on innovation.

However, the truth is that the guidelines themselves are somewhat vague. Even within the FTC’s business guide, they admit that judging an ad will come down to “the overall context of the interaction, not just to elements of the ad in isolation.”

But within these guidelines, there’s much more emphasis placed on the publisher’s responsibility in identifying and disclosing native ad content. We’re in a period of media explosion, with more consumer touch points and an ever-evolving definition of a digital “publisher.”

The challenge going forward for the FTC, advocacy groups, advertisers and publishers is to manage and evolve guidelines without choking innovation in the market. When it comes to the publisher’s responsibility, this could get tricky.

It helps to first understand native advertising. At its most basic, native is a mechanism for delivering content marketing, a strategy with a long, rich history in the media world. Content marketing is about delivering something of value to the consumer with the understanding that the consumer knows they are receiving a form of advertising.

This is the overarching message of the FTC guidelines -- that users should understand what they’re reading and why. Truthfully, this shouldn’t be much of a challenge. The public is intelligent, and it’s probably overreaching to pretend that consumers don’t understand when they see native advertising.

Native advertising is anything but nefarious, and most publishers and advertisers play by the rules. Still, there are always bad actors, and minimum guidelines and enforcement make sense.

This is where it gets sticky, and the FTC has the potential to over step. The online advertising industry must be nimble, flexible and innovative to keep pace with consumer technology developments. A decade ago, no one would have predicted that mobile would account for so much Web traffic.

Even in the days of Myspace, no one would have anticipated advertising APIs for an app like SnapChat. These developments have placed the industry in one of the most innovation-rich periods of its history, with tech and media evolving rapidly.

By assigning so much liability to the publisher, the FTC is failing to account for innovation. The definition of the “publisher” is changing right now and many entities that could be categorized as publishers will not be fully able to control how advertising is delivered on their platforms.

We’re no longer confined to the traditional idea of a publisher, such as TheNew York Times or Travel + Leisure. Today, companies like Uber are exploring ways to deliver content natively via their app, effectively making them a “publisher.”

The FTC guidelines for native must extend to this kind of content marketing. In the extreme – yet unlikely – instance that the FTC decides to dictate the format and placements of native advertising, this kind of innovation would get crushed.

But Uber is mobile, which makes it still somewhat traditional in today’s media landscape. At the moment, the FTC conversation doesn’t extend past mobile and desktop to the Internet of things (IoT), where native advertising will be front and center.

If the native guidelines are only built around display and in-app, then regulation is limiting how the market can evolve, even if it’s doing so unintentionally.

Those days may seem far away, but they’re coming sooner than you think. Native ad disclosures are adequate today, and as long as they are built in to every form of native advertising, from desktop to mobile to IOT delivery, then marketers and publishers (of all kinds) should be fine.

No matter the medium, native will remain one of the best ways for advertisers to reach consumers, provided they deliver an ad message that matters. No matter what native looks like, today or 10 years from now, quality content will trump everything else.