Under the U.S. Navy's Articles of War, "it is unlawful for a warship to go into action without first showing her true colors." That's a good rule for marketers and publishers to keep in mind as they consider how to incorporate native ads in their marketing mix.

The online advertising industry has shown an unrelenting drive toward programmatic for nearly every media channel. But native, a relative newcomer, is largely understood to be different.

Only about nine months ago, I was attending an invitation-only digital media conference. During a panel on the topic of programmatic advertising, in a room filled to overcapacity, a heated exchange broke out and quickly spilled into the audience. On one side of the debate were a small but vocal group (yours truly among them) who believed that native programmatic was a concept whose time has come. On the other side, in vastly superior numbers, were those who believed that programmatic and native were completely incompatible, that the very term "native programmatic" was practically an oxymoron. How quickly times have …