The Dawn of Native Advertising and the Dusk of Editorial Objectivity
The Natives Are Getting Restless
By Steve Penhollow
There may not be a machete sharp enough to cut through the current thicket of advertising and marketing jargon. But Britton doesn’t shy away from extricating one vine from the bramble any more than it shies away from overusing jungle metaphors.
The vine we are dealing with today is native advertising.
Pundits disagree on its exact nature, its worth and its long-term impact, but they don’t disagree on its popularity. In December 2013, according to the Emarketer website, the local-media research company BIA/Kelsey estimated that spending on native advertising would grow from $3.1 billion in 2014 to $5 billion in 2017.
If Native Advertising Looks Like a Duck, Swims Like a Duck, Quacks Like a Duck …
So what is native advertising? It is advertising that has been carefully designed to look like everything else on a page, whether that page is made of paper or pixels.
“Native advertising,” Columbus [OH] College of Art & Design advertising instructor Andrew Havens wrote in an email, “is, I think, more about the ad container matching the editorial container as closely as possible.”
Havens said native advertising predates the digital era, and he cited as evidence the Hallmark Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame is a long-running series of syndicated made-for-TV movies commissioned and sponsored by the Hallmark greeting card company.
The movies themselves are advertising for greeting cards only in the sense that they, like cards, are usually tearjerkers. It’s the Hallmark ads that run amid the movies that constitute native advertising.
“On the old Hallmark Hall of Fame show,” Havens wrote, “the ads themselves were usually little vignettes about someone having a heart-touching moment with a piece of Hallmark content. As my mom used to say, ‘The ads make me cry as much as the show.’”
Native advertising is content that has been carefully designed to look like everything else on a page.
Hallmark’s brilliant advertising ploy was to make each commercial-break ad a mini movie that told a genuinely touching story involving a Hallmark card. Of course, viewers of Hall of Fame movies never mistook or mistake commercials for independent content. They just enjoyed and presumably still do enjoy the Hallmark commercials.
Blurred Lines Between Editorial and Advertising
In the digital age, it is becoming harder and harder to tell what is promotional and what is autonomous. The further blurring of lines between advertising and editorial called native advertising excites people who see native advertising as a vibrant new revenue stream and disheartens people who cling to old-fashioned notions of editorial integrity.
Native advertising is attractive to advertisers and media companies because people who ignore banner ads and pre-roll ads (which is pretty much all of the people) tend to take a chance on advertising that closely resembles editorial content.
Native advertising, good and bad, is predicated on a trick: an advertisement that is designed to look like editorial content.
One of the problems with native advertising is that it tends to vary widely in quality and intent. Let’s imagine an advertising spectrum that has advertorials (defined as advertisements with superficial editorial traits) on one end and sponsored content (defined as informative content with a subtle advertising bent, created by a publisher for a sponsor) on the other.
Pundits can’t seem to agree on where native advertising fits on that spectrum. (Pundits probably wouldn’t even agree on how I defined the terms on that spectrum.) Perhaps that’s because native advertising can fall anywhere on that spectrum.
Few Overcome the Negative Perception of Native Advertising
In an entertaining rant on his HBO program, British comedian John Oliver presented an unmitigatedly negative view of native advertising.
Even people who disagree with much of what he had to say must concede the gulf between the two pieces of native advertising he cited: an informative New York Times article on women’s prisons that had a relatively subtle tie-in to Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black and an uncritical Atlantic magazine puff piece on David Miscavige, the controversial leader of the Church of Scientology.
The risks of alienating readers or users with native advertising are at least as great as the possible rewards.
The Scientology piece, described as a native ad by Atlantic spokesperson Natalie Raabe and as an “advertorial package” by the Washington Post, proved to be a huge embarrassment for the magazine.
Readers smoked out the flimsiness and general pointlessness of the piece fairly quickly, perhaps because it seemed to have been written by a Scientology press flack and not an Atlantic journalist. To add insult to injury, the Atlantic did not allow the article to be freely commented on, as revealed in the Washington Post.
When the usual rights of readers are curbed to protect the feelings of an advertiser, the native advertising strategy starts to look like a road to nowhere.
To be fair, there are plenty of examples of successful native ads.
Jami Oetting cited a few on HubSpot.com, including Thrillist Media Group’s collaborations with GE (on content commemorating the 45th anniversary of the moon landing and on the release of futuristic sneakers), a Wired piece on technology that was sponsored by Netflix, a collaboration between Slate and Wells Fargo about the use of beatboxing at a school for the visually impaired, a humor piece sponsored by Starbucks on the satirical site The Onion, and an exceedingly savvy collaboration between Newcastle and Gawker that made fun of native advertising while accomplishing the aims of native advertising.
What all these successful native advertising campaigns have in common is value. They don’t insult the reader’s intelligence, and they are made more of pith than of puffery.
Losing Trust Through Ambiguous Language
As I mentioned above, one of the many things marketing professionals seem to disagree on is how to define jargon used by marketing professionals.
Journalist and blog entrepreneur Andrew Sullivan had a memorable meltdown on this topic while chatting about native advertising with Brian Braiker of the website Digiday.
“Native advertising,” he said. “Sponsored content. What the [expletive] does that mean? Branded content? For [expletive] sake. As soon as they start giving you gibberish, you realize they’re doing something naughty.”
The jargon and how the jargon is defined are immaterial. Regardless of argot, intended resting place of the sponsored content, and authorship of the sponsored content, the bottom line is this: If a publisher’s advertising strategy involves mixing ostensibly objective content with content paid for by an advertiser, then that publisher has to make certain no reader or user walks away feeling duped.
The website BuzzFeed is the acknowledged master of this, but some cracks in its native armor began to appear in early 2015, when it was revealed that the site had censored itself under pressure from advertisers.
Successful native advertising campaigns have two things in common: They don’t insult the reader’s intelligence, and they are made more of pith than of puffery.
Native advertising is one thing. But advertisers having the power to nix unsponsored content? Proponents of native advertising have a tough time finding enough lipstick to make that pig look attractive.
A website that censors itself under pressure from advertisers runs the risk of telling its users that they are not a top priority. Several surveys have shown that the risks of alienating readers or users with native advertising are at least as great as the possible rewards.
The ways that websites and media companies identify native advertising vary widely, according to Lucia Moses at Digiday, and readers and users are expected to somehow know that the terms (“presented by,” “sponsored content,” “paid post”) share a common definition.
A survey conducted by native ad tech company TripleLift revealed that 63 percent of respondents didn’t know they were looking at an ad even when it was labeled as such.
Another study conducted in 2014 by the website Contently came to some similarly disquieting conclusions: 52 percent of respondents didn’t know what the label “Sponsored Content” means, two-thirds of respondents said they’d felt deceived upon realizing that an article or video was sponsored by a brand, 54 percent said they don’t trust sponsored content, and 59 percent believe a news site loses credibility if it runs articles sponsored by a brand.
Tricking the Reader = Losing the Customer
Native advertising, good and bad, is predicated on a trick: an advertisement that is designed to look like editorial content. So a positive outcome is dependent on whether readers or users feel the content they were tricked into perusing was worth the deception.
“I think that’s correct,” Metropolitan State University of Denver marketing professor Darrin Duber-Smith responded in an email. “The point is that in traditional media there are rules against this. For me, the intent is the thing. As a published writer, I feel that there should be a distinct line between advertising and content. Advertorials as an entire concept concern me.”
Oliver likens it to a child biting into what he thinks is a chocolate chip cookie only to find it is full of raisins.
Publishers that use native advertising better be ready to make a strong case for their raisins.
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Steve Penhollow
Freelance Contributor
BMDG
Photos: BMDG and Shutterstock
