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Native advertising has come under fire for being deceptive. It is, claim critics, an attempt to fool readers into thinking they’re consuming content produced by the publication itself when in fact they’re consuming an ad. It’s this criticism that led Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai to ban ads masquerading as articles.

Outbrain banned native advertising from the inventory of content it promotes on websites.

In an AdAge post, Rafat Ali suggests the following ways to improve branded content: Approach a native advertising assignment from the customer’s perspective, answering their questions and solving their problems. Go deep, with a narrow focus and uniquely valuable content that appeals to a defined audience subset. Offer data not easily found elsewhere that provides genuine insight, including new ways to understand the business. Approach native advertising like an editor, not a marketer.

study reinforces the importance of context that advertisers need to consider when deciding what content to promote and where via native advertising.

Over 8o percent of respondents said brand mattered, which poses a challenge for advertisers aiming to use native ad units to drive awareness.

Visitors to online news sites said they are more open to advertising on those sites that focus on a story rather than pitching a product.

But then there’s the whole obsession now with tying content to revenues—in other words, tracking whether people who are consuming your content will eventually buy something from you, and putting a hard number on each piece of content you create. Do you think that’s misguided? Oh, I think there’s no question it’s misguided. It’s been shown over and over again to be misguided—that in a world of zero marginal cost, being trusted is the single most urgent way to build a business. You don’t get trusted if you’re constantly measuring and tweaking and manipulating so that someone will buy from you.

I don’t have any problem with measurements, per se; I’m just saying that most of the time when organizations start to measure stuff, they then seek to industrialize it, to poke it into a piece of software, to hire ever cheaper people to do it.

There are constantly trends and fads on the Internet, and people make a good living amplifying them. But I think that industrialized content marketing is one of those fads, and it will end up where they all do: petered out because human beings are too smart to fall for its appeal.

By 2014, “Facebook the big news machine” was in full swing with Trending, hashtags and news outlets pouring resources into growing their Pages. Emphasizing the “news” in News Feed retrained users to wait for the big world-changing headlines to come to them rather than crisscrossing the home pages of various publishers. Many don’t even click-through, getting the gist of the news just from the headline and preview blurb. Advertisers followed the eyeballs, moving their spend from the publisher sites to Facebook.

In 2015, Facebook realized users hated waiting for slow mobile websites to load, so it launched Instant Articles to host publisher content within its own app. Instant Articles trained users not to even visit news sites when they clicked their links, instead only having the patience for a fast-loading native page stripped of the publisher’s identity and many of their recirculation and monetization opportunities. Advertisers followed, as publishers allowed Facebook to sell the ads on Instant Articles for them and thereby surrendered their advertiser relationships at the same time as their reader relationships.

This is how Facebook turns publishers into ghostwriters, a problem I blew the whistle on in 2015. Publishers are pitted against each other as they make interchangeable “dumb content” for Facebook’s “smart pipes.”

Advertisers will have the option to turn their promoted tweets into different ad formats while still using the same creative and targeting elements. For example, tweet engagement campaigns could become native ads and promoted video campaigns will transform into in-app video ads.

The move is part of the platform’s expansion of its Twitter Publisher Network (TPN), which has now been renamed to Twitter Audience Platform.