Marina Go, the general manager of Hearst Bauer Media (which publishes Elle Australia, Harper’s Bazaar and Cosmopolitan), told a New News panel on media advertising: “We are at the beginning of a native boom.”

Native advertising refers to the growing practice in which advertising and brand recognition more closely dovetails with user experience on digital platforms, especially mobile devices. Critics suggest it can be a digital euphemism for old-fashioned advertorial practices in which distinctions are blurred between editorial and advertising content. 

But the head of Sound Alliance, Neil Ackland, said the company was using native advertising that was distinguishable from other content, with the company having expanded its business model after noticing readers were using their mobile phones more than their computers.

“Junkee was established last year with the publishing principle of ‘mobile first’ and is social at its core, as 93 per cent of our audience is on Facebook,” he said. “Our business model uses native advertising that is clearly signposted.”

“You have the most success when you show that you really understand the brand.” —  Marina Go, Hearst Bauer Media

He added: “Attention is the great economy of today. Holding your reader’s attention is getting harder and harder, but if you face the challenge right, it can really deliver; for the brand and the publisher, as well as the reader who may share the content on social media.” 

Ms Go said publishers needed to “move away from the mindset that print subscribers are more valuable than mobile subscribers”.

She said this was made clear by figures for Cosmopolitan, which had more subscriptions for its mobile site than for its magazine.

Ms Go also said it was important for publishers to know the brand well for native advertising to work.

“You have the most success when you show that you really understand the brand, and spend a lot of time with the client,” she said. “You have to take them on a little journey, step by step.”

While native advertising has been criticised for having the potential to affect the integrity of the content being published, Ms Go doesn’t believe this is the case.

“If you produce something you wouldn’t normally run, you’re doing your readers a disservice. If it becomes too much like advertising they’ll back off pretty quickly,” she said.

The managing director of Conversant Media, Zac Zavos, said a lot of thought was put into native advertising strategies, while a former editor of The Age online, Hugh Martin, agreed. “Publications don’t want to put off their readers and need to stay in line with what their audience wants,” he said.

“We [would] run many analyses of our audience, like the most popular times of the day for video views and then develop strategies to improve.”

“Get your audience right before you worry about the format.” — Ben Barren, SocialDesk

Similarly, the founder of SocialDesk, Ben Barren, said the advertising format could be overdone, and companies needed to create the “right ads, for the right audience, at the right time. Get your audience right before you worry about the format.”

Ms Go agreed, saying that “the learnings for us are that it is dangerous to assume that one size fits all”, while she emphasised the value of data, as it “helps you refine and understand your audience”.

Cosmopolitan recently used native advertising on its video site CosmoTV.

“We ran a 12-part series, sponsored by The Body Shop,” Ms Go said. “Sponsored advertising in videos is an opportunity for the future, with its success measured by the number of views.”

Mr Ackland said online content had the added advantage of being easily shared.

“If someone likes content online, they’ll share it on social media, but they won’t cut out an ad from a magazine and give it to their friends.

“We once published a story about INXS’s Original Sin, and it was republished on social media by INXS themselves, who have between three and four million fans on Facebook. That was like the Holy Grail for us.”

The boost in native advertising poses the possibility of brands publishing increasingly their own content and creating their own channels separate to publications, in similar fashion to Red Bull’s radio station.

Mr Ackland said the Red Bull example was “the ultimate in native advertising, but you’ll always need other contextually relevant channels. Brands will always need quality mastheads that people use for informed content, and brands will exist within that space.”

Mr Zavos agreed: “There’s a subtle distinction between good and bad content that uses native advertising. We never write just about the brand. We write articles around one or two of the brands attributes, so we’re getting their message across, but still keeping in line with the publication’s values. That’s what makes really good content.”

Mr Ackland’s business model ensures that if the line between content and advertising becomes too entangled, both the publisher and the brand are able to have their say.

“It’s a challenge when journalists are writing about a brand. We have a policy that either party can strike out at any point, particularly if the editor feels pressured by the brand to risk the publication’s art form,” he said.

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