If you work in digital, every few months you hear of another study pointing out most digital ads are never seen. Commentators with antipathy toward banners respond with blog posts such as “Astounding News from Moronsville,” in which the charming Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman wrote, “You simply cannot make this s**t up.” Alas, you’d think Zuckerberg would walk away and start an auto body shop.

Nope. Global digital ad spend is predicted by eMarketer to rise to $132 billion in 2014. Why? Because it is working better than comparable advertising channels.

On the burning fields of digital media, where everyone knows click-through rates have fallen to horrific lows in the 0.07 percent range, a strange bright flower is growing. Facebook’s new in-stream ad units are generating unheard-of click-through rates of 1 percent or higher. Is Facebook giving away the store?

Native advertising is a more insidious encroachment into consumer media content than any prior form of advertising. Billions of banner ad impressions may annoy readers, but they don’t misdirect users by disguising the source of the message — and this is exactly what native does. If publishers and marketers aren’t careful, they are going to poison the well of digital ad communications by breaking consumer trust.

First, understand why publishers are so tempted to make native their future…

If you believe banners suck, you’re not alone. The poor things are so disparaged that the entire digital industry has repositioned them as display advertising to wipe off the banner stigma.

But the truth is, banner ads work just as well as most other forms of media, which is remarkable given their small size, surrounding clutter and creative limitations. So let’s do something that people in media rarely do: compare banners to other forms of media, using the same yardstick of response rates…

Filmmaker Peter Jackson’s new installment from Middle Earth has so much sexy technology you’d think reviewers would swoon: 3D; high def; 48 frames per second. Instead, we’re hearing a big yawn. Where didThe Hobbit go wrong?

Welcome to the Q Curve. Consumer technology has gotten so good that the professionals we once paid to produce something startling now have difficulty staying ahead…