Tag: Sponsored Content

The Rumbled Grift Of “Sponsored Content”? Ctd

A reader gives Gawker some due regarding their partnership with Newcastle Ale:

I just wanted to provide this insight in case no one else has. I use Adblock Plus in my Firefox browser. When I clicked through to the Gawker post from your feed, the very first word and other words were missing from the body text – every instance of “Newcastle.” I toggled off ADP for just that page, and voila, they appeared.

I’ve used ADP for years and have enjoyed a pretty damn clean browsing experience. It’s kept me from getting too annoyed at online ads in general. But I wouldn’t have assumed it would protect my delicate sensibilities from innovative trickery such as paid content.

So, tip of the hat to Gawker. They instituted some tagging that allowed the brand they’re advertising to be made invisible if the smart visitor has taken measures to be shielded from ads. I think that’s rather ethical and deserves recognition.

For the record, the Dish has praised Newcastle Ale for its creative ads – when they are not enmeshed with editorial copy. We love ads – especially creative ones. We’ve had a Cool Ad Watch on this site for years. And yes, Gawker deserves props for tagging sponsored content as advertising. My concern is with the deceptive attempt to disguise ads as editorial – undermining the credibility of journalism, and conflating copy-writing with writing, for short-term cash at the expense of long-term viability. Another reader zooms out:

While I generally agree with you on the problem of native advertising, I have more confidence than you have that the audience can detect and separate advertising from journalism and commentary. Remember: native advertising has been around for a long, long, time.  For example:

there were the Mobil Oil ads, designed to mimic editorials, on the New York Times’s Op Ed page from its inception in 1970. William L. Bird’s Better Living and Stuart Ewen’s PR! discuss how corporations (and the National Association of Manufacturers, among others) have historically controlled, composed, produced and distributed advertising explicitly designed to imitate popular journalistic forms on the radio, in newspapers and magazines, and on television.  Go to a library and flip through old Fortune magazines from the 1930s and 1940s and you’ll see precisely what I’m talking about.

The American audience is more savvy about their media than you give them credit for.  All those Buzzfeed/Gawker/Upworthy clicks don’t represent influence, modified behavior, or much of anything in reality.  That’s why digital advertising lags so far behind the pricing of print advertising – even in 2014.  People respond to print ads and direct mail; they don’t respond to digital ads.  The audience’s unresponsiveness to native advertising will ultimately lessen its effectiveness and presence (look at how The Atlantic‘s native ads on Scientology did precisely nothing to help the Church).

So I’m not as worried as you are.  The real problem is that when native ads prove useless and disappear, their existence will have seriously degraded the credibility of journalism.  And, when you get down to it, credibility is the ONLY thing the New York Times can sell that differentiates it from everything else on the web.  That’s your point; and we agree that this short term fix is terrible in the long run.

The Rumbled Grift Of “Sponsored Content”?

Here’s an “ad/post/article/sponsored content/whatever, it pays the rent” that leaps out:

Newcastle Ale ‘bought’ me — an in-house copywriter — because actual Gawker writers can’t accept money from advertisers (not that I’m personally cashing Newcastle’s checks but you know, whatever). As someone being paid to write this, I have to say that it’s the greatest ad ever, mostly because Newcastle asked me to use those exact words. Is it the greatest ad I’ve ever been paid to call the greatest ad ever? Yes.

It’s by Stephanie Georgopulos, Senior Content Producer at Gawker Media, or more technically, a “sponsored collaboration” between Newcastle and Studio@Gawker. Yes, the newspeak deepens every time you check in.

It’s an interesting twist on sponsored content, and perhaps – or am I over-reaching? – a harbinger of its eventual collapse.

The “article” is titled: “We’ve Disguised This Newcastle Ad as an Article to Get You to Click It.” Clever, meta – meta-meta even. Even the ad/article/post is meta: “Welcome to the mega huge website we could afford for the mega huge football game ad we couldn’t afford.” But all of this pirouetting suggests to me that Gawker’s “content producers” are beginning to realize that their audience is catching on to the fact that, along with so many other sites, they routinely “disguise an ad as an article to get you to click it.” Now, it seems, to retain any sense of hipness with their increasingly clued-in readership, they have to own the lie, take off their disguise and reveal the fact that large swathes of online content is deliberately deceptive and written by people who know they’ve been “bought” by corporate interests to create propaganda.

At some point, doesn’t the whole house of cards start to tumble? When a grift is rumbled, doesn’t another grift need to be created to fill the gap?

Update here.

Mike Allen: The Smithers Of Roger Ailes

Erik Wemple has another blockbuster piece on the corporate public relations newsletter known as Mike Allen’s Playbook at Politico. This time, it’s about the constant, fawning press releases Allen writes for his favorite news channel and personal idol, Roger Ailes. The latest piece of puffery from Allen is a summary of the new Gabe Sherman book on the Republican operative running the Republican Party’s propaganda outlet. For some reason, almost none of the critical details about Ailes made it into Allen’s account, merely anything that Ailes himself would be happy with:

He chose far more flattering stuff, like the part about Ailes being “The Most Powerful Man in the World,” about Ailes’s rough childhood, about Ailes winning over Rupert Murdoch, about Ailes winning over employees, about Ailes’s marketing genius, about Politico scoring a presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan library, to Ailes’s dismay. Save for a nod to Fox News’s alleged deception over an infamous anti-Obama video from May 2012, Allen all but “Zevved up” the Sherman book. That is, he made it sound a lot like the very favorable Ailes biography that author Zev Chafets last year published with the network boss’s full cooperation.

To take a fair but highly critical book and make it seem like a hagiography is Allen’s mojo when it comes to Politico’s advertizing clients (including those whose sponsored content appears within Allen’s daily suck-up to power and money in Washington). But the Ailes-worship is close to pathological. Just read it all yourself and make up your own mind. But, to my mind, Wemple proceeds to cite case after case after case of fellatial coverage of Fox and Ailes from the perkiest team-player in the Washington Media-Corporate Village. Now, you might think that this is too easy. Selective pickings from Allen’s daily, lucrative plugs for the rich and powerful could find anything. But what makes Wemple’s pieces persuasive is that he also includes any examples he can also find of faintly-critical coverage. They’re there, but in such minuscule proportion to the relentless positive p.r. for Fox that they almost seem designed to bolster its credibility. And that’s why Allen’s disgracefully tardy response to this is so lame:

Over the past seven years, there have been more than 8 million words of Playbooks, including hundreds of announcements from every group under the sun. You could cherry-pick items to make any case you wanted: that I’m a conservative hack, or a liberal tool, or a bad writer or a good guy.

No you can’t. The mountain of evidence and counter-evidence that Wemple has assembled is proof that Allen will flatter anyone with power for access and suck up to anyone with money for cash. Now that does not mean that Allen does this in a conscious way. My own sense is that he is so eager to please the powerful, so desperate to be included in their circles, so obsessed with remaining a player in DC, that he may simply not see that his constant cooing into the power vortex of Washington is at best an exercise in public relations, rather than journalism, and at worst, an obvious inversion of the journalist’s core role, which is to challenge power rather than to celebrate it. In other words, subjective naivete and a desire to be accepted is not incompatible with objective corruption.

But Wemple has a coup de grace. He notes how odd it is that, given Allen’s constant suck-ups, Politico’s stars very rarely show up on Fox News. And yet it isn’t that odd at all, as Fox’s response to the charge reveals:

Former Fox News PR ace Brian Lewis told Jim Romenesko in 2012, “We do not have a do-not-deal-with-Politico policy. We deal with Mike Allen.” As they should.

And, when they need a mouthpiece to rebut telling criticism, they still do.

Schopenhauer On The Age Of Sponsored Content

The Dish constantly links to and loves Maria Popova. For me, she represents the best that the Internet has to offer. She gets paid by reader Schopenhauerdonations and affiliate income. She writes what she loves. She reads books. She has seized the limitless potential of the web – but by bucking the cult of contemporaneity, by digging up the old and true rather than the new and buzzy, by building a community of readers who flock to an oasis far away from what she has called the “Buzzwashing” of our collective online minds.

In some ways, her appeal is pretty straightforward as a writer. She is unmistakably genuine. Nothing she writes is obviously designed purely for getting money (although, of course, she has done really well by simply writing tirelessly about what she loves). And so you can see why re-reading some of Schopenhauer’s essays on writing and journalism appealed to her. His brutal take-down of writing for money is about as good a case for that position as I’ve read:

The author is cheating the reader as soon as he writes for the sake of filling up paper; because his pretext for writing is that he has something to impart. Writing for money [is], at bottom, the ruin of literature. It is only the man who writes absolutely for the sake of the subject that writes anything worth writing. What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as if money lay under a curse, for every author deteriorates directly [whenever] he writes in any way for the sake of money. The best works of great men all come from the time when they had to write either for nothing or for very little pay.

When I was very young, I used to wonder why the newspaper had the same size every day – as if what was actually news didn’t vary, when it obviously did. As a working writer for much of my adult life, I understand now why the economics of journalism operates that way, and probably has to. But an economics that directly rewards eyeballs at the expense of any other criterion – i.e. the current economics of most of the web – or a “journalism” that is paid for by corporations – i.e. sponsored content – would horrify Schopenhauer. His standards are impossibly high; his judgments overly broad and caustic. But he was onto something, as is Maria. And our culture could learn a lot from it.

(Painting by Jules Lunteschütz)

A Sign Of The Times, Ctd

Dell York Times

A reader testifies to the local impact of national news brands going the way of sponsored content:

I work at a newspaper in flyover country, and Wolff’s column on the NYTimes’ embrace of “low advertising” hit me like a brick. Not that my organization has anything resembling the cachet of the Times – far from it. But like every other newspaper in America, we’re undergoing head-snapping changes that, at times, feel as if the ultimate goal is to turn us into Buzzfeed, or a local-level clone.

Five things you can do to avoid traffic jams! Here are 10 things you should do when the mercury drops below zero! More and more, our publication and web site are filled with the “cheesy come ons” that Wolff describes – and that’s the supposed NEWS content. I can’t help but think this ultimately devalues us as a legitimate source of real news, even if it drives web traffic higher. Maybe this is the democratization of content, where content that generates clicks is considered the “best” type of content, but best for whom? It’s as if we’re replacing meat and potatoes with Cheetos – delicious but ultimately frivolous and unsatisfying.

When you see the metrics every day, and it’s clear that quick-hit crime stories or freak-show stories generate as many clicks as an investigative piece that took weeks to report, what rationale can there possibly be for doing the investigative work, the longer-form stories that actually help explain the workings of a community to the people who live there? That’s what I fear; that in our relentless pursuit of clicks, in our mania to remake ourselves in the image of Buzzfeed, we’ll ultimately make ourselves less relevant. And then what would differentiate us from any other aggregator or producer of cheesy come-ons?

Another sends the above screenshot:

I saw this when I went to the New York Times website a few minutes ago. “The New nytimes.com” – it’s “Sleeker. Faster. More Intuitive” – just like a Dell?

I should add that I do think that the design – especially the light blue and the blunt disclosure “PAID FOR AND POSTED BY DELL” – put the NYT in a different league than, say, Buzzfeed. But I get queasy reading another disclosure that reads:

This page was produced by the Advertising Department of The New York Times in collaboration with Dell. The news and editorial staffs of The New York Times had no role in its preparation.

This is what we were told yesterday:

The labor and cost of creating native ads is a hurdle, and the Times made it clear that it sees the product as suited to only a limited number of advertisers. It won’t come cheap for the Times, either, which is looking to hire a dozen or so people for a “content studio” to staff the effort.

So I guess the NYT employees who will be writing the copy for a sponsored page with the New York Times brand at the top are not part of the news and editorial staffs. So what kind of staffers are they exactly?

The NYT picked Dell in part because the chief copy-writer has “journalistic chops.” So I assume the new “content studio” employees will also have journalistic chops. What department will they be regarded as being in? Advertizing? I don’t think employees with journalist skills have ever been used at the NYT to help corporations write ad-copy designed to read like NYT articles. What do we call them? Neither pure copy-writers nor independent journalists, they are, I suppose, “content providers.” The deeper you go into this miasma in which public relations and journalism become close to indistinguishable, the more the newspeak has to proliferate. Another reader:

When you first started swinging at Buzzfeed about all of this blurring of journalism and ad revenue, I was thinking “Meh, I hate Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed’s stupid, why would you go there unless to waste some time and braincells anyway?” But Time, Inc. and the NYTimes?! That is bad. Bad for all of us. If the NYTimes morphs into fucking ad copy we’re at a very, very low point of our culture. For this, you guys get more than the $25 I gave last year. I’ll give The Dish as much as I can afford next month at renewal time. Because independent journalism MUST THRIVE.

When we picked a pure subscription model over a year ago, I honestly wouldn’t have believed that a year later, even the NYT was knee-deep in corporate propaganda with the NYT logo and other articles at the top of the page. Especially after their great pay-meter success, why sacrifice something so special as the integrity of the NYT for what cannot yet be big bucks? My fear is that one day – soon – it will be. And your ability to look at a random NYT page on the web and know for sure it’s not a gussied-up ad will slowly atrophy. As, I fear, will whatever reputation for integrity journalism has left.

The NYT Follows Buzzfeed

Screen Shot 2014-01-08 at 2.12.57 PM

The pinnacle of American journalism is now hiring a Dell employee to write its “articles”:

“We wanted to start with someone who we thought really understood how to be a great storyteller,” said Meredith Kopit Levien, evp of advertising for the Times. “And [Dell global communications managing editor] Stephanie Losee was [a writer] at Fortune. She has deep journalistic chops herself. So this was a very deliberate choice to go with Dell.”

Let me get this straight: the New York Times is hiring a copy-writer as a pseudo-journalist because she used to work as a real journalist. Time Inc is now having its “editors” report directly to the business side and the NYT is opening its elegant blue-stocking legs as wide as it decently can to accommodate a computer company. This passage was particularly revealing:

Dell used its launch ad to spotlight stories on topics like millennials in the workplace, marketing tech and women entrepreneurs. The campaign, which is set to run for three months, contains a mix of content from its own newsroom, articles from the Times’ archives and original stories by Times-contracted freelancers on Dell-chosen topics.

My italics. So Dell is now a “newspaper” partnering with the New York Times. By which I mean that the New York Times will actually hire people to write Dell’s ad copy and make it look as close to the rest of the paper as possible. Then this:

After Dell, a handful of other clients whom the Times wouldn’t name have committed to using the product in the coming months. But the labor and cost of creating native ads is a hurdle, and the Times made it clear that it sees the product as suited to only a limited number of advertisers. It won’t come cheap for the Times, either, which is looking to hire a dozen or so people for a “content studio” to staff the effort.

Always follow Orwell to the language. Have you ever heard of a newspaper having a “content studio” before?

Note that the NYT is not simply taking Dell’s ad-copy and gussying it up to deceive casual readers into thinking this advertizing is editorial (with a firm disclosure as a fig leaf). They are creating an in-house team to write the fricking ad-copy and calling it “content”. So what is the rest of the paper? Non-content? What is a newsroom but a content-studio?

Yes, they will add a clear identifier – and better than most. But, as Adweek notes, since the whole point of native advertizing is to deceive the inattentive readers into reading it because it looks an awful lot like regular copy – this is a very wobbly and blurry distinction. And when viral pages get completely disconnected from the rest of a news-site, the clear contrast between ads and journalism is close to invisible.

So look: it’s time to congratulate Jonah Peretti. He sure is winning. The business of journalism is now indistinguishable from the business of public relations. The New York Times has a newsroom. And so does Dell. Dell has an advertizing department – and the New York Times helps staff it. In the future, most big companies will have their own newsrooms (read: propaganda/advertizing outlets) and independent journalistic institutions will just have competing newsrooms, increasingly dependent on the corporate in-house “content studios” and answerable to them. At some point, and certainly at the rate we’re seeing, the distinction will soon evaporate altogether.

We are all in public relations now. Thanks, Mr Sulzberger.