Once around the park, James, and don’t spare the sources!

The hardtracking staff has started to discern the dawn of Sneak 2.0 – a second wave of stealth marketing that tries to herd the ads in sheep’s clothing into more profitable quarters.

Start with Joe Mandese’s piece in MediaPost’s MediaDailyNews

Native Ad Plans Shift From Publishers To Social, Facebook Dominates By Wide Margin

Digital publishers may have embraced “native” formats as a godsend for new advertising revenues, but the majority of ad execs are more keen on using the method on social media outlets vs. conventional content publishers. That’s the top-line finding of a new survey of advertisers and agency executives being released today by Advertiser Perceptions Inc., which suggests native advertising is reaching an inflection point that will soon be dominated primarily by social media.

Helpful graphic:

Which is to say: “Currently, ad execs estimate 43% of their native ad budgets are being allocated to conventional publishers, but that is down an average of 25% vs. 2015. Social networks currently account for 39% of the respondents’ native ad budgets, but that is up 14% over 2015.”

Facebook, here they come.

Then again, where native ads run might not matter so much, given this Joe Lazauskas piece at NiemanLab . . .

Read the rest at Sneak Adtack.