Last September, as one small part of an outreach program aimed at getting schoolchildren interested in engineering, ExxonMobil paid for one of those BuzzFeed quizzes. You know the ones I’m talking about: Answer a series of questions in order to learn whether you’d be Belle or Aurora if you were a Disney princess.

In this case, the answers determined what kind of engineer you should be. Readers were presented with nine multiple-choice questions and statements, like “What was your favorite part of summer camp?”, “What do you look forward to most on a road trip?”, and “Pick a cell phone case.” (I undertook the exercise. I’d make a great systems engineer, it turns out.)

The quiz is clearly labeled as native advertising. (ExxonMobil is referenced twice in the prominent disclosure.) As part of a broader campaign that focuses on attracted kids to the STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) disciplines, it serves a noble cause.

One thing it is not is “fake-fucking-news.” Nor it is product placement or an advertorial. These are the three labels David Weinberger and Doc Searles ask publishers and brands to use insead of native ads.

The call for a new label is part of Weinberger and Searles’ 121 New Clues, an addendum to The Cluetrain Manifesto, the ground-breaking set of 95 theses the pair published 16 years ago with co-authors Christopher Locke and Rick Levine.

Under a category titled, “Marketing still makes it harder to talk,” Weinberger and Searles attack native advertising, asking marketers to “Please stop dressing up ads as news in the hope we’ll miss the little disclaimer hanging off their underwear.” The next clue suggests that, “When you place a ‘native ad,’ you’re eroding not just your own trustworthiness, but the trustwortiness of this entire new way of being with one another” (meaning the Internet commons). They wrap up the section by suggesting that “Advertisers got along without being creepy for generations They can get along without being creepy on the Net, too.”

I read these New Clues the same day I learned about the ExxonMobile-sponsored engineering quiz. I haven’t been able to reconcile the two.

There are plenty of examples of bad native advertising. At the same time, native advertising is not inherently bad. It does not inherently erode trustworthiness. It is not inherently fake.

In fact, it’s not easy to find an example of native advertising that purports to be news at all. The vast majority more easily fits the feature category, like the example from Hennesy that goes behind the scenes with Sir Malcolm Campbell, who broke the 300 mph land speed record in 1935, or a Guide to Oysters from Guiness.

Or they are news features, like the Netflix-sponsored story on women inmates that appeared in The New York Times in advance of the season 2 launch of the series, “Orange is the New Black.” (It’s worth noting that this article looks absolutely nothing like New York Times articles.)

I spent a couple hours trying to find one native ad that qualified as news and the closest I came was a piece from Allstate appearing in The Atlantic reporting results of a survey. Allstate conducted the survey along with the National Journal. The graphic indicating it’s sponsor content is hard to miss.

In all of these cases, the research and reporting was solid. The writing was strong. The articles sold nothing; they were not ads dressed up as news. (They were not, in fact, ads at all in the traditional sense, beyond the fact that a brand paid for the space to run them.) They were of interest to readers of the publication. And the disclosure was far from a “little disclaimer hanging off their underwear.”

But what about the potential for brands to buy space to run news? I’m not sure who assigned news outlets the exclusive right to determine what is news. News is, by definition, new or noteworthy information of interest or importance to some defined group of people. The rise of citizen journalists, bloggers, and other non-traditional purveyors of information can all lay claim to news deliver. Why not brands? As Edelman CEO Richard Edelman put it in a blog post:

The media world has shifted from mainstream only to additional categories of born digital and social. The business models of the latter two rely on paid media. Therefore it is incumbent on us in the communications field to have distinctive native programs that stimulate sharing of content or improve the state of knowledge.

In many cases, the content produced for native advertising is every bit as good, relevant, and newsworthy as that produced by journalists employed by the publisher. The only difference is that, for any number of reasons, the editors didn’t assign that particular story. In fact, more than one study has found consumers like native ads as along as they’re relevant.

There are, to be sure, issues with native advertising, mostly among brands and publications happy to disguise blatant advertising as editorial content. There are also programmers who write malicious code. This does not make all code malicious and all coders untrustworthy.

It also doesn’t matter whether the category is called “native advertising,” “advertorials” or “Bob,” as long as the articles are useful, accurate, and relevant, and the disclosure of the brand paying for the content is plain and obvious.

This isn’t a repudiation of the New Clues, by the way. The 121 clues are designed to produce a higher level of conversation (of which I hope this post is a part). I agree with a lot of them. We all are indebted to Weinberger and Searles for introducing the topics and launching the conversation.

In the New Clues, Weinberger and Searles also dumped heavily on the growth of the app environment. I’ll address that in my next post.