Native advertising: the same old story
In the accompanying photograph, a front page from British conservative daily The Daily Telegraph from last June that I had kept for a class I gave on native advertising.
The image doesn’t appear to contain any advertisements at all, but this is just because it’s a screen captured using a browser that has an ad blocker installed. But look at the news item in the geometric center of the page, entitled, “Tunnock’s: where life has never been sweeter”. Click on the headlines, and you are taken to an impressive advertisement with full size photographs, mouth-watering formats, and texts generated by the Telegraph’s editorial team. It’s obviously an ad.
But there is something important to highlight here: despite obviously being paid content, there is nothing saying as much anywhere. The format is the same as the newspaper’s front page, and there is no indication in the story itself that this anything other than a real story.
Native advertising, content marketing or branded content are the new buzzwords. According to a report by the US Online Publishers’ Association, 73% of its members used these types of formats in July 2013, and 17% more planned to use the format sometime over the remainder of the year. The reason is clear: according to the brands that use it, the format works. While we haven’t yet been able to agree in a definition of native advertising, the IAB has already published a report aiming to categorize the subject, and the Federal Trade Commission is looking into how best to regulate it. In the meantime, the users of digital media still have no idea at all of what the term means, or its implications.
My impression? That we are going round in circles. We’ve been here before. Given the choice, I prefer native advertising—which many pundits have described as “the incorporation of advertising in the design and the domain of publications”—to the intrusive formats, ugly and bothersome, that have been associated with online advertising since its beginnings.
Advertising incorporating itself into the format is still advertising, and the key to the whole issue, as ever, remains clarity and transparency. The reader must know what is going on. What differentiates journalistic content from an advertising supplement is that payment is involved: it is of secondary importance whether the format is integrated into the design of the publication or not.
If there is any confusion, if the reader doesn’t know whether he or she is reading something that has been paid for, then we have a problem. Using euphemisms, or thinking that “the reader is sufficiently intelligent to spot an advertisement”, is simply hiding an interest in improving access rates the wrong way. In other words, we’re not talking about anything new here.
Special advertising sections are clearly identifiable as such, but this doesn’t stop some media from trying to hide their true nature. Every week there are interviews and reports on companies in the print media that are there simply because somebody has paid for them to be there. To a large extent, the prestige of the publication rests on its willingness to renounce such advertorial, or to label them appropriately so that its readers know what they are reading.
The example of The Daily Telegraph used to illustrate my piece today caught my attention for two reasons: the quality of the production, which is to its credit; and another, not making it clear that this is an advertisement, which is to its detriment.
As we know, the same problems are emerging with online advertising as with traditional media: pages that mix content with advertising in the most clumsy and obvious ways, with sponsored posts that are not labeled as such, or advertorial and interviews disguised as real content, with news written by the companies they are about, and stuck in with other items as though they were real news. More of the same: nothing that we haven’t seen before.
Do we need to consider regulation? If regulation is going to be the same as in the print sector, where some of the most-respected publications are happy to charge companies who want to pay for an interview with their CEO, then no. If there is going to be regulation, then it must be serious, and with severe sanctions for those that infringe the rules from both sides, publishers and advertisers. Clarity and transparency are the order of the day here. If there is to be no regulation, then the market will eventually learn that there are media who only publish items that meet real editorial criteria and label the rest as advertising, and those that do not.
I have no problem with brands generating content, and given the way the web is evolving in terms of the social networks, it seems a reasonable certainty: comments, retweets, likes, shares, +1s, and all the rest are attracted by conversation, not by unidirectional pamphlets and advertising. And if conversations make their way into the media and are incorporated as sponsored content alongside editorial content, that is probably also fine, as long as it is appropriately identified as such. But can we please stop trying to trick the reader: this is where the real difference lies, and nowhere else.
(Disponible en español, “Native advertising: la misma historia de siempre”)
