Dear ad industry: You should care about media literacy, too

I have an odd proposal for the ad industry: One of our most potent weapons in the war for human attention is the media-literate consumer, and we should work to cultivate more of them.

I’m talking about the consumer who can tell when an ad is an ad, when a news story is sensationalized with partisanship or outright faked, and when a publisher cares more about clicks than quality. These are the consumers who, when they see a cluttered ad experience, know that their attention isn’t beig properly valued and promptly install an ad blocker. These shouldn’t be the consumers who scare us; they should be our allies, and we need more consumers to be like them.

Why? The ad industry needs a drastic, lasting shift to quality. One of the primary reasons that the entities in our business that are cheapening advertising and threatening its long-term health are able to do so by exploiting low media literacy. If they can’t do this so easily, we’ll be one step closer to a media landscape where quality can prevail.

Years ago, my colleague Joe Marchese wrote a prescient essay that spelled out the crisis facing the advertising industry in pretty bleak terms: That it’s effectively in a situation parallel to the housing crisis of the 2000s. Much like subprime mortgages, bargain-basement ad impressions are packaged and repackaged into bundles that make them look like they amount to something, funneled through ad networks sufficiently opaque to disguise not just the worthlessness of the “impressions” but the ability for massive amounts of fraudulent activity to weasel its way in.

That was 2014. With 2018 on the horizon, fraud remains a $16 billion problem for advertising. Meanwhile, 2017 has fed us a grotesque panoply of revelations about how brokers of misinformation were able to permeate the digital publishing world, particularly on social media platforms, sowing political divisiveness that has led to an internet littered with conspiracy theories and hardline partisanship. Perhaps the most telling of these exposés was the blunt finding that many of these news fraudsters cared very little about the ideology that they may have been pushing; it was about stoking outrage to maximize ad impressions. We are, very much, still in a subprime advertising crisis; perhaps an even worse one than when Joe published his original essay.

One of the reasons why the housing crisis was able to gain leviathan status was the fact that the players involved knowingly preyed on the Americans who were most lacking in financial literacy — the ones who were not equipped to realize that zero money down was, quite likely, too good to be true. Financial literacy levels are better in the U.S. than the global average, but still low — 57% in 2015, according to Standard & Poor’s Global Financial Literacy Survey — and the number of people currently dealing with predatory student loans suggests that there’s still considerable ground to make up.

Similarly, the industry actors that are knowingly profiting from low-quality ad impressions and a culture of toxic, divisive, and often exaggerated media are able to do so because they’re taking advantage of low media literacy. A report released shortly after the 2016 presidential election by researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Education found that the media literacy of students from middle school through college was shockingly low, with 82% of middle schoolers unable to distinguish native advertising from editorial content, and 40% of high schoolers willing to accept the veracity of news presented on social media without a credible source. There are a few nonprofits committed to improving youth media literacy (The Lamp, for example), but in the meantime, much of the nearly 80% of the U.S. population that uses the internet is self-educated, adapting to digital media as it evolves. Given the industry’s notoriously frenetic pace, it’s unsurprising that media literacy lags.

Yet the advertising industry is more or less absent from calls for improved media literacy. This can, and needs to change: If media literacy is considered an essential skill for the average consumer, and those committed to quality advertising are leading the charge, shady players in the industry who have been taking advantage of the lack of it will lose ground. That’s because the ad industry can, uniquely, help expand the knowledge base of media literacy to not just include an awareness of editorial or entertainment content, but also of advertisers’ role in subsidizing it. Nobody is positioned to help consumers understand this better than the ad industry itself — but it’s going to take some honesty.

Need ideas? Besides being general backers of journalistic literacy by supporting education initiatives and other means to awareness, here are a few starting points specific to the ad industry:

We can help consumers know what advertising is, and isn’t.
Part of promoting media literacy is provided the needed context to consumers about the fundamental purpose of advertising and the role that it plays in helping to subsidize the news and entertainment they love. Advertising, at its core, isn’t just a brand message (and there are plenty of brand messages that aren’t advertising), but a transaction in which consumers are asked to pay attention to something they probably don’t want (an ad) in exchange for something they do want — a song on Spotify, an article in Politico, an episode of The Simpsons on Hulu. This value exchange is key to understand.

We can emphasize the importance of knowing when an ad is an ad.
This leads to a recommendation that may make some advertisers uncomfortable: Stop disguising ads as editorial content. Make it clear what has a brand’s backing. While proponents of so-called native advertising may have once talked a big game about “authenticity” and “storytelling,” the blunt reality is that media literate consumers can tell the difference and that it erodes their trust in both the advertiser and the publisher.

Long-form, journalism-style brand content has a lot of promise, particularly in certain sectors (personal finance comes to mind). But it’s up to brands to make sure that consumers have a reasonable way of knowing when an ad is an ad. This will amount to not just raising consumer awareness of when there is a brand message behind something they’re reading, but also of reducing the perception that deception is a primary motivator for the ad industry.

We can transparently explain our media buying decisions when consumers ask.
There has been plenty of talk in the ad industry about “less-is-more” approaches, from ad load reduction on TV to increased awareness that ads should be viewed with meaningful attention rather than simply thrown in as many places on the internet where consumers might see them. Yet mini-scandals continue to bubble up when it’s revealed that advertisers continue to subsidize content that’s questionable at best.

Much of this is due to advertisers’ willful ignorance. They aren’t purposely buying ads that run alongside bogus news stories or exploitative YouTube videos, but they’re suckered into it because of the tantalizing CPMs that come from low-quality media buying — the kind of too-good-to-be-true pricing that is the reason the ad industry faces a crisis much like the housing crisis. But consider this: If a brand or agency is too embarrassed to explain publicly that it doesn’t know where its ads are running, maybe it should rethink its media buying strategy. The consumers are the ones to whom we hold ourselves accountable.

We can treat ad blocking as an opportunity to learn — and open dialogue with consumers.
One irony of our current reality in the advertising world is that right now, often the most media-literate consumers are trying to make us go away entirely: They’re using ad blockers. This is because they know that the ads they’re seeing online don’t properly value their attention, and they’re fed up. Rather than fighting the precipitous rise of ad blocker usage — the likes of Adblock Plus and Ghostery show no signs of losing their dominance in the browser extension download rankings — the ad industry can use this as an opportunity to reset the dialogue with consumers about what amounts to a fair advertising opportunity.

The reality is that a media-literate consumer is a consumer who can sniff out bad behavior in digital media, and can avoid it in turn. Helping more consumers to understand what constitutes quality content won’t completely solve the problem — but it’ll be an important step in turning the tide against subprime advertising and the low-quality content that it supports. Becoming part of the conversation and effort around improving media literacy is one of the strongest ways that the ad industry can show it actually cares about the content that it supports, and about ensuring that more consumers care about it too.

This is important because, to put it bluntly, nobody’s looking out for the ad industry except itself. Joe Marchese wrote in his 2014 essay: “Unlike the financial services industry, advertising is not too big to fail. Millions of Americans have not placed their life savings in advertising. In fact, in part because online display ads are so terrible and so oversaturated, most ordinary people don’t particularly like advertising and wouldn’t care if it went away.”

It’s a small step to redemption. But given the overall climate, the ad industry needs a few good strategies for saving itself, and the fight for quality media could use all the advocates it can get.