Dive Brief: 

• At the American Magazine Media Conference Tuesday, panelists discussed the hot topic of native advertising. 
• The panel—which included executives from Forbes Media and Starcom MediaVest Group's LiquidThread North America—discussed their disagreements with the American Society of Magazine Editors' new guidelines that suggest sponsored posts not have the same font or graphics as editorial content. 
• Panel members agreed that sponsored posts should look more like editorial, not less, or they completely lose their effectiveness. 

Dive Insight: 

The panelists hit on an important aspect of native advertising in that we have conditioned people to ignore ads, but native advertising helps overcome that obstacle. From an advertising perspective, native ads lose their power if you stray too much in style from the editorial content. If that happens to the practice as a whole, the purpose of native advertising will be lost and we will be struggling yet again to get people to notice ads.