Just when you thought the hype couldn’t get any louder, the buzz on native advertising continues to grow. In the past few weeks, several smart people have claimed that native ads might just be the thing that kills off the monstrous banner ad in our growing social and mobile world, while soaring past the seemingly invincible Google. While these most recent articles make compelling cases for the many strengths of native, they ignore the very characteristic of native advertising that makes it fundamentally different from display: the utility of the ads for the consumer.

In predicting the Fall of the Banner Ad, Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times makes a compelling case for the success of native advertising over the page-slowing, aesthetically challenging and generally annoying banner ad. And while there have been some technological and visual innovations in banner ad delivery that attempt to address these challenges, by and large, they still have the feeling of “the monster that swallowed the web,” particularly--and significantly -- to consumers. Conspicuously, however, the case put forth on behalf of native overlooks this aspect, which is in fact the very thing that gives native a chance to live up to its hype: it is better and more useful for the consumer.

Because the most obvious difference between native ads and banner advertising is the quality that gave it its name -- a format that reflects and therefore respects the content in which it is served -- the reasons for the increased popularity of native are often misplaced. It is not actually design or aesthetics that determine an ad’s success or failure, it is its ability to be meaningful to the person who may click on it. This is proved by Google’s extraordinary success at building the first truly native ad application: paid search. It has generated enough cash for the search giant that it can now build driverless cars and make Web-connected glasses. So when Ben Thompson attempts to make the case in his provocative post on Peak Google that "there is no obvious reason why they should win this category,” he is not only overlooking Google’s invention of paid search -- he is also ignoring the company’s current leadership in the least discussed but fastest-growing native ad marketplace: Product Listing Ads.

Back in 2012, while everyone was fawning over promoted tweets and sponsored stories, Google was quietly launching a new ad product called Product Listing Ads (PLA). The technology, which displays actual products instead of text search results for product-related searches, has been incredibly successful. In just two short years, PLA has become an $8 billion market. Surprisingly, not many marketers and retailers in ad tech fully understand its implications on the broader ad marketplace. PLA is the truest type of native ad. Its sole function is to be useful to the consumer. Using images, text and other rich information, these ads help consumers find exactly what they are looking for at the precise moment they are looking for it. Consumer engagement in these ads and their consequent success is off the charts because they address a shopper’s need in a direct, highly visual way.

Although there is a chance that PLA will become yet another ad market dominated by Google, Thompson may have a point: despite Google’s first-mover advantage in PLA, the fundamentals and flexibility of this new native market can be applied outside of the dated search box. Indeed, Google faces real competition from big players and up-and-comers like Amazon, Pinterest, and Houzz who are beginning to use PLA.

Five years ago, Google was the go-to destination for searching products, but the growth of mobile and social applications since then has changed all of that. Increasingly, consumers are engaging with apps and social networks to discover products, bypassing traditional Web sites which are often, not insignificantly, riddled with the twenty-year-old technology of the banner ad. As a result, retailers are seeing a 60% year-over-year increase in revenue originating from social sites, and in PLA alone leading brands are seeing 45% of their traffic coming from mobile devices.

These trends are only accelerating. As the outlets for consumer discovery multiply, PLA will become the largest and most diverse native ad marketplace; it will deliver on the native ad hype. And if that means fewer banner ads and less Google dominance, all the better.