With all the traditional media channels, including newspapers, magazines and television shows, shrinking, advertisers are worrying about how they can reach customers. Banners(横幅) ads on our devices are ugly and disturbing. To overcome various digital problems, the ad industry has been serving up a sneaky(不光明正大的) solution: make ads look less like ads and more like the articles, videos and posts around them.

    This trend, called native advertising, has taken over the Internet; even the websites such as NYTimes.com and Wall-Street.com are using it. On Facebook and Twitter, every 10th item or so is an ad; only the small subtitle “Sponsored（赞助）” appearing in light gray type tells you which posts are ads.

    Won't dressing up ads to make them look like reported articles mislead people? Sometimes, yes. An Interactive Advertising Bureau study found that only 41 percent of general news readers could tell such ads apart from real news stories. And it's getting worse. Advertisers worry that the “Sponsored” label discourages readers from clicking, so some websites are making the labels smaller and less noticeable. Sometimes the labels disappear entirely.

    At a recent talk about the difficulty of advertising in the new, small-screen world, I heard an ad manager tell an impressive story. She had gotten a musical performance – paid for by her soft drink client- perfectly inserted（插入）into a TV awards show, without any moment of blackness before or after. “It looked just like part of the real broadcast!” she recounted happily.

    Look, it is great that native advertising works. But if advertisers truly believe in their material, they should have no problem labeling it as advertising.

    For now native ads continue to be a fashion- with no laws governing them and no labeling standard. But that could change; the Federal Trade Commission has begun considering regulation. If the new generation of digital advertisers clean up their act according to the regulation, native ads might become more acceptable.