The noise around native advertising has become a din. It's now almost as loud as the gorilla's drum roll for the 'In the Air Tonight' Cadbury ad.

But is it anything really new? A scary, cheating mash up of editorial and advertising or really something we've actually lived with all our lives?

New native is not really about content masquerading as something it's not. It's about distribution and relevance (or mischievous irrelevance).

Scroll back seven years.

The 2007 gorilla ad was made for TV and cinema but ended up notching 6m Youtube views. It was brand as entertainment and became a must-share.

Scroll back still further.

As a teenager in the 1970s I fell in love with the Old Spice surfing ads. Slo-mo tubes. Miami Vice-style girls gazing from the beach. Serious man-stuff.

Wasn't so sure about the climax, though, when it all finished off with a homo erotic eruption of after shave onto a chap's face. We used to laugh about it in the schoolyard.

But 40 years ago that all passed for a happy ending and you could only see it on TV with the social experience limited to a huddle of friends. Small thought: if the surfer had been wearing a Go-Pro it might have made a decent native ad today.

Scroll forward to 2010.

Old Spice is reinvented as slick, brand entertainment with the Isaiah Mustafa quick fire monologue, The Man Your Man Could Smell Like. A sagging 72 year-old brand was crying out for magic bullets like: "If your grandfather didn't wear it, you wouldn't be here today."

Mustafa notched up 47m Youtube views and this month’s Old Spice follow up, the Momsong, with mothers lamenting their son's puberty got 1.3m views within days of release.

The success of in-stream native is about flowing across devices. According to Business Intelligence’s neat definition: "Ads seamlessly integrated into a user's feed and appear to be organic content.”

And everyone expects a lot more. A BIA/Kelsey report forecasts that social media advertising will boom into an $11 billion market by 2017, with native advertising seizing 42% of that spend.

So if the explosion in native is about putting content in front of millions without a scratchy user experience then it is no wonder that brands are surfing the next Old Spice wave with video-sharing networks like Pinterest, Vine and Snapchat - as well as through the usual channels of Twitter and Facebook.

Print media still fights over the Church and State of editorial and advertising. And that’s absolutely right in terms of hard news, which has always been the sharp end of the stick.

But in less severe digital chapels, why so po-faced? Time is precious and people appreciate either learning or laughing with an ad.

Native content that offers an immersive, social experience outside a pure brand message is nothing new. It’s what Mad Men always aimed for.