John Oliver may be uniquely positioned to take down some of the hype surrounding native advertising, given that his "Last Week Tonight" appears on ad-free HBO, as he notes at the top of this segment that aired last night.

Afforded that freedom, he pulls no punches, taking on media execs like Jonah Peretti, founder-CEO of BuzzFeed, which gets 100% of its revenue from native advertising; Joe Ripp, the Time Inc. CEO who has been pulling down the wall between church and state as his company builds a new native-advertising unit; and Meredith Kopit Levien, exec-VP of advertising at The New York Times, which has also been enthusiastically embracing native advertising.

The whole extended rant is scathing, thought-provoking and very funny -- particularly at the end when Oliver, suggesting that turnabout is fair play, injects some hard-news content into a (fake) Diet Coke commercial.

Simon Dumenco is the "Media Guy" columnist for Advertising Age. You can follow him on Twitter @simondumenco.