Seeing it as the salvation for dismal click-through rates for online display ads, so-called “native advertising” is expected to get increased play from marketers in 2013.

“We're hearing a lot about [native advertising] from a variety of clients,” adds Mark Himmelsbach. “It's the evolution of the advertorial. The wall that exists between web ads and content at publishers is coming down.”

“Publishers do want to delineate the ads from the editorial content. They don't think it will diminish the advertising,” Jacoby says.

There's an added cost for advertisers to consider when doing native advertising right, says Kozma. “The content has to be customized to each placement,” she says. “What your run on The Huffington Post has to be different from what you run on Forbes.”

With that in mind, Kozma muses that native advertising currently presents a special opportunity for B2B advertisers, whose tradition is in finely crafted messages. “Native advertising is an interesting model,” she observes, “for them to talk in a more personalized way with their audiences.”

How do you think of native ads?