About a year ago, in the middle of a pitch, I was interrupted mid-presentation by the client,  who handed me a manila folder. In it were the elements of their content program from the previous year with one of our competitors. The program consisted mainly of press releases masquerading as reported journalism, lying side-by-side with magazine editorial, with little differentiation between the two. The client’s question: “So tell me: Will you do that?”

Cue awkward silence, followed by more awkward answer: “No.” Then, I had to launch into an explanation of our stance on the separation of church and state and on transparency and clarity, which are not only commitments we make to our readership, but also an expectation they have of us. This is part of the value inherent in our brand; if we were to erode that, we would also erode the value we provide to you as a client.

They went with last year’s partner. I’m okay with that.

I tell this story not as a humblebrag about our integrity, but rather to illustrate how complicated the world of publishing has become. It used to be that transparency in publishing mostly required a newspaper or TV station to divulge when a story was about their parent company. Would that the world were still so simple.

Publishing is a difficult business. In the case of many publishers, ad revenues are declining at the same time as consumers are increasingly less willing to pay subscriptions for content because of its perceived ubiquity.

On the flip side, brands are less willing to invest in traditional display advertising. Ad blockers are the new industry demon, but long before they pre-empted the ad impression, the web trained users to ignore standard advertising real estate. Does anyone really even see the right rail on a web page anymore?

These circumstances have spawned revenue-driving innovations among publishers. The chief and potentially most controversial among these are content marketing and native advertising.

On the off chance you are unfamiliar, in simple terms, content marketing is the use of branded content—articles, white papers, infographics, videos created by or on behalf of a brand—to help achieve a marketing communications goal with a desired audience.  Native advertising (and I will stipulate this is my definition) is advertising placements designed to look “native” to the page in which they sit. While usually designated as advertising or sponsored content, they are not intended to stand out from the rest of the content on a page. And generally, these placements drive to a piece of branded content.

But as the roles and outputs of brand marketers and publishers collide and overlap, we are seeing a confusion among users about what they are reading and in some cases a decrease in trust for both brands and publishers. In their 2015 trust barometer, public relations firm Edelman cites integrity and engagement as the leading attributes for a brand trying to establish trust in itself and its innovations. Ironically for publishers, the very innovations that, for many, are driving increased engagement with both readers and advertisers, bring into question their integrity as a trustworthy information source.

So what are publishers and brands to do? Is it possible to provide publishers with new revenue streams that satisfy the marketing needs of brands while still serving readers in a clear, transparent way?

This is exactly what I hope to discuss during Social Media Week on our panel, “Making the invisible visible: The evolving roles of data trust and transparency in advertising and publishing.” I’ll be joined by Tonia Ries, senior VP and executive director of Edelman Square; Barbara Basney, VP of global advertising and media at Xerox; Mary Gail Pezzimenti, VP of content creation for the Partner Studio/AOL at The Huffington Post/ AOL and Amanda Rubin, global co-head, brand and content strategy at Goldman Sachs.

Barbara and Tonia will be sharing some of their ideas on this subject in Marketing Unbound later this week. With this interesting mix of experts, all of whom approach marketing and content from different angles, I hope to explore the challenges and ambiguities of the current publishing and advertising climate and, perhaps, surface ways in which we can find innovation while preserving the integrity of the reader experience.

Join The Economist Group’s panelists Feb. 23  and The Economist‘s Patrick Foulis Feb. 25  for a panel on the price of personalization. Tweet with us at #SMWEconomist. Register now for Social Media Week NY and  use code smwnyc25off for a 25% discount.   

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited (EIU) or any other member of The Economist Group. The Economist Group (including the EIU) cannot accept any responsibility or liability for reliance by any person on this article or any of the information, opinions or conclusions set out in the article.