Once upon a time, there was a bright line between advertising and editorial content/entertainment.

As in, here’s where the news content stops and the advertising starts; or here’s where the entertainment programming stops and the advertising starts.

No more.

Marketers and news organizations are now doing their best to redefine advertising as “just like editorial content,” as one Forbes Media executive explained.

Start with news media distributing brand-produced videos cheek-by-jowl with news videos.

From MediaPost:

The Natives Are Restless: News Publishers Move Line Distinguishing Edit, Ad Content

If there is a red line delineating the church and state of journalism, some big news publishers have just crossed it — introducing a spate of new “native” advertising formats that blur the line between advertising and editorial content in new ways, including brand-produced videos served directly in the news organizations’ video news players. The publishers, which include NBC News and Forbes, are not sheepish, much less apologetic about moving the line more to the advertisers’ side of the ledger, but say it is part of an inexorable — indeed an inevitable — shift merging the “storytelling” of their organic journalism with those of their advertisers.

It’s all about new revenue models, the newsvertising organizations say, “as well as changes in the way consumers — especially digital users — consume and even think about news content . . . ”

For further details, see Sneak Adtack.