So you think that designing an advertising plan for your products is a difficult business now? Well take a grip of your computer because the way things are headed, working out an advertising schedule is going to need tertiary mathematical skills.
You might remember how simple it was. "I'll have three flights of TV commercials and two press ads a week for the next three months." The ads were made by your agency and you watched closely to see if they were working or not.
"Native ads" describes the vague cross-over between advertising and editorial. We are used to this in "advertorial", common enough in all newspapers, supporting the car or property pages. But here you clearly know that the display ad on the page is paying for the supporting copy up above. It probably says "advertising" at the top of the page.
Native ads are different, perhaps more subtle. With mobile media or search engines, they respond to the key topics you're looking for. They don't necessarily hit you with a bright product ad, but perhaps an answer to the question you haven't even asked yet.
It may be an article by a journalist, sounding very reasonable. This is where the card-carrying journalists raise their hackles. Most, yours truly included, were taught the 11th Commandment: "Thou shalt not mix editorial with advertising". But the intelligence of technology has made that line hard to draw.
Arif Durrani, head of media at Britain's Campaign Magazine, sees native ads as the way which will make digital media work. "Display ads, not least those large banners on most websites, have failed", he insists. "They have failed to capture the attention of readers. They have failed to generate enough revenue for publishers. They have failed to provide enough traffic for advertisers."
He points to the launch of BuzzFeed in the UK and now Australia, as an indication of trends. This on-line magazine was not taken too seriously - until it started to stack up the numbers in the US and attract the big investors, more than $46 million to date.
Just last month Forbes magazine quoted BuzzFeed's global audience at 85 million, and growing fast. That's a lot of viewers for cute cats and endless "top 20 lists". But now they have hired real journalists and started reporting political news, covering the election and the Washington shut-down.
News Corp was among the first of the major media to dip its toes into the digital sea. By erecting pay walls around The Australian and then the other papers, it had a lonely time until all the competitors came rushing to follow.
But the online dollar still doesn't cover the "rivers of gold" that the old newspaper model supplied. So are native ads the way to go? How many clicks does it take to pay for a double page spread? How does sponsored advertising retain credibility?
The younger publications have little problem bending the rules - they didn't write them in the first place. Whereas the establishment are more cautious. There's a flood of questions in the minds of the world's media execs, there are no easy answers. Just some hard maths for the rest of us.
