Dive Brief:

• The Washington Post is embracing the longform multimedia story format, as seen here, for its native ads. 
• The Post's native ad program, WP BrandConnect, is working with brands to raise the quality of native ads in an effort to appeal to readers. 
• To be transparent, ads will continue to be labeled “sponsor generated content” and will use a different background color and font than editorial content. 

Dive Insight: 

Appealing to readers should be a high priority for any publisher, and if that means making native ads as close to editorial as possible, then the Post is on the right track. The advantage to the longform content is that the content can be much higher quality and help to increase readers' interest. The idea is that if the text and multimedia features actually offer value, readers shouldn't care whether it's sponsored content or not.