Native advertising is the phrase on everyone’s lips in digital circles right now. A glance at the agenda for The Guardian’s forthcoming Changing Advertising Summit is proof enough; in its agenda summary it states that native advertising “has arrived and is getting the industry excited”.

But look a little closer and it seems that some pockets of the online advertising world are still approaching native with a surprising degree of caution. Why? Well, many an advertiser has read ‘native’ and thought ‘advertorial’. And there’s the rub. Native advertising may be many things, but advertorial it certainly is not. Many advertisers still bear the scars of an advertorial campaign that sounded so good at the time, but emerged as a flabby, flavourless piece of copy with some tired, generic imagery plonked next to it. Result? One disenchanted advertiser, one disheartened editor and hosts of utterly disinterested consumers. If you’ve been there and bought the T shirt, how tempting must it be to throw any attempt at bringing advertiser and editor together into the same bucket and then run in the opposite direction?

Flip the coin on the other side though and we’re seeing an increasing number of brands and agencies embrace native advertising as an exciting way in which to engage consumers. Why is it working so well for them? Well, native advertising ticks some crucial boxes. Box one: authenticity. Great native content is written by an editor, for his or her readers, in a manner that fits seamlessly with the rest of the content on the site. It isn’t poked and prodded, altered or amended stylistically by the advertiser. It remains true to editorial style and tone. Box two: respect for reader, advertiser and editor. The editor takes the trouble to understand what the advertiser is trying to achieve and creates content that meets that strategic need, and that content is created with the purpose of being genuinely captivating and useful to the reader. Box three: context. Native advertising doesn’t pull the reader away from the place they chose to go in the first place. It keeps them in that place and simply rewards them with enjoyable content to consume.

Years ago, I don’t think anyone could have predicted that digital advertising could serve any purpose other than to directly point the consumer towards a particular product or service. Yet increasingly we are seeing brands embrace storytelling in the way they market and advertise online, allowing the reader to continue to enjoy absorbing the content that they actually went online to view in the first place. Some of the cleverest examples of native advertising we now see are set up to excite readers, fans and followers, and appeal to them by speaking to them - be this through words, imagery or video content - in the same style and tone of the surrounding content. Native at its best hooks consumers in before the main brand message even becomes clear.

A recent campaign by Unilever highlights a great example of this. To promote its new range of smaller Dove, Sure and Vaseline deodorants, it commissioned influential female editors from fashion, lifestyle and parenting websites to write regular articles – a ‘Small Thought’ each week. The power of the campaign lay in the fact that rather than write about product, editors demonstrated in real time, ‘the power of small’. As the weeks progressed, comments and conversation developed and were shared around these ‘small thoughts’ just as they would be on any other article on the sites. The key to the campaign’s success was that the content was compelling, authentic and crucially, felt entirely at home on those sites to the audiences engaging with it.

In digital, we now have the technologies to integrate advertising messages into content in so many exciting and innovative ways that native advertising should never feel like an add-on. Whether you’re advertising toilet cleaner or an inventive new gadget, there are untold ways that brands can go about doing it, and I think this brings about an exciting new era in digital advertising.