• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, May 19, 2014

Meredith Kopit Levien, EVP of Advertising at The New York Times, isn’t afraid of a little controversy. Alluding to Jill Abramson’s abrupt dismissal, she joked on Monday: “It’s been a quiet week at The Times.” Similarly, during her keynote presentation at OMMA Native, Levien embraced the publisher’s new native ad strategy in a way sure to make some on the editorial side cringe. Native -- as a strategy, not a noun -- has the potential to make advertising “great again,” she said. With native ads, The Times is aspiring to achieve the same level of consumer engagement as editorial content, she said. It should share the same production value of editorial, she said. With native, ads can be “additive to the culture” at The Times, in Kopit's words. Of course, not everyone at the paper feels the same way. Among other issues, a dispute over native advertising apparently factored into Abramson’s dismissal, last week. The now former executive editor and Mark Thompson, the paper’s CEO, didn’t see eye to eye on the controversial ad format, Ken Auletta reported in The New Yorker. “She had already clashed with … Thompson, over native advertising and the perceived intrusion of the business side into the newsroom,” Auletta reported.