In recent years native advertising has been developing into a new revenue model for print media, and is notably being used with online media. Native advertising has gone from being merely a trend in its early years to a fully integrated part into the daily business activity of nowadays media companies and any other organization that could directly profit from this type of advertising. Closely related to this approach in the concept of design thinking which will be the focus of this paper. Design thinking is a problem-solving approach with an emphasis on assisting people and organizations to develop their sense of creativity and innovation. Its essential characteristic is „thinking outside of the box“, as well as the ability to overcome challenges from different aspects of life. More precisely, this way of designer thinking uses designer methods in order to understand and meet people's needs, while developing at the same time sustainable and feasible business strategy (Brown Tim 2009). A fundamental point of design thinking process is focusing on the human aspect and finding ways of solving their difficulties. This paper aimes to determine weather the design thinking approach is being used only as a tool to increase overall creativity and imagination of a company's business or it could as well represent a new, altered form of native advertising. For this purpose, a range of secondary data from both native and foreign, as well as scientific articles and professional litrature was used – books , scientific articles and various internet sources. It is the role of design thinking that was deciphered through a case study analysis of the Native Ad studio of Hanza Media company. Based on conducted research it is possible to conclude that the method of design thinking can be applied when creating a native advertising campaign and that it can be beneficial for encouraging originality and innovation, ultimately adding value to the native advertising message.