At some point, I will return to the LIMITLESS website(s) and break down that ridiculous/amazing/ridiculously amazing adverticle (seen here: Profile: nbcn.ewstoday.co, breakingreports.co). But for now, I will share a clip from Last Week Tonight where John Oliver discusses native advertising, in which an advertisement has the same look and feel as other articles of the publication in which it appears. Unlike adverticles like the LIMITLESS one above, however, native advertising isn’t just shamelessly ripping off the format of a trusted information source to mislead the consumer, the content actually and legitimately appears on the publication’s page, and has the OK of the publication’s editors.

Also, here is a link to the article from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) mentioned in the video (“Critical to Success of In-Feed Sponsored Content Are Brand Familiarity, Trust And Subject Matter Authority, As Well As Relevance, According to New Research From IAB & Edelman Berland”). Interestingly, the “…less than half…[recognized] that the material was advertizing” specifically refers to the general news audience (one of the three groups of news users examined in the study, the other two being business news and entertainment news users). In contrast, the majority of both business and entertainment news audiences were able to recognize in-feed sponsored content (the specific type of native advertising discussed in the video) as advertising.