The IAB has released the first part of a series of guidelines aimed at ensuring transparency in the marketing industry around native advertising and protecting consumers.

The guidelines provide advertisers, agencies, publishers and ad tech companies with clear, practical steps that will ensure consumers can always identify native advertising as paid for content.

Two of key guidelines laid out are providing consumers with prominently visible visual cues enabling them to understand they are engaging with marketing content, such as brand logos or design, and labelling the ad in a way that demonstrates a commercial arrangement is in place, for example “paid promotion” or “brought to you by”.

The guidelines, supported by ISBA – the voice of British advertisers – the Association for Online Publishers and the Content Marketing Association, are being put in place to reflect the growth of native and content advertising spending, which hit £216m in H1 2014, accounting for 21 per cent of all display advertising spend.

“Paid-for advertising units which are deliberately designed to replicate the look and feel of the editorial content that they appear against needs to be obvious to consumers,” said Alex Stepney, public policy manager at the IAB. “The guidelines help companies involved in developing and publishing such native ad formats to provide the necessary levels of transparency to consumers and uphold the integrity of online advertising.”