Like early-1800s railroad engineers trying to figure out the optimal width for track gauges, gadget makers in the 2010s are frantically experimenting with wearable technology. Nike put a “+” sports sensor into sneakers. Google launched Glass heads-up eyeglass displays. Disney research labs has announced Touché, a technology that can turn any surface — clothing, water, your leather couch — into a touchscreen sensor. Reebok has headgear that tells football players when they’ve taken too big a hit. Wearable is the new gadget gold rush.

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…