Month: March 2013

Spot The Sponsored Content, Ctd

DevourNativeAdvertising

A reader passes along the “Examples of Native Advertising” entry on WikiExample. It’s a terrific guide to some of the tricks of the trade. The caption for the above screenshot:

Devour’s video ads are integrated with all of their curated videos and clearly marked as an “AD.” In the bottom right corner there is an ad for “Mouthopedia,” which is an entertaining video by Mcdonalds about their Bigmac. This allows the advertiser to get a similar CTR [Click-through rate] as the other spots as it is right in line to the other curated videos.

But at least it clearly says “AD”. I’d rather the word “ADVERTISEMENT”. It’s what we’re used to in understanding the difference between editorial and advertizing. Update from a reader:

I think Wiki is using an old method of Devour IDing ads. The site doesn’t even mark them anymore, so it’s even worse now. For example, a Grey Poupon ad the site is hosting as “Sponsored Video” (a small label in the same color font as the video’s description, thus barely noticeable) is not even labeled as such on the front page. 

A reader adds to this post about Buzzfeed using Fark to direct traffic to its ads:

I’m a long-time Farker and I’ve noticed these new Buzzfeed links, too. The existence of sponsored links isn’t new to Fark, actually. We’ve seen sponsored headlines for a few years (e.g., from Cracked). What makes these new ads really different is that there isn’t a link to comments. Fark is a comment-driven site and the lack of ability to comment on a link like this really makes it stand out, and not in a good way. When Cracked sponsors a link, there’s a risk that they’ll draw in snark if the link sucks. In a weird way, that makes me respect those links more, even though they’re just as commercially driven and, if anything, more stealthy. The lack of ability to talk about the Buzzfeed links signals, to me, a lack of confidence, and I’m sure that I’m not the only Farker who feels the same. Because of this, I don’t think that they’re doing their advertisers much of a favor with this trick.

Several more examples from readers below:

I don’t know if you saw it but at the bottom of the “sponsored content” IBM ad on The Atlantic you linked to it states that “comments for this thread are now closed”. I wanted to leave a comment expressing my displeasure with the ad. Alas, I cannot, but there are no other comments in there anyway. Were comments ever open?

I also notice the article was tweeted 37 times. I wonder how many of those twitter uses knew/did not know that this was an ad.

I wonder how many of them work for IBM or the Atlantic. Another:

Check out one of the more popular tech sites, Techmeme. It says “Sponsor Posts” but I used to click on them without realizing it until it hit me recently.

Still, the Techmeme sponsored ads are clearly not Techmeme once you get past the homepage. They have a different font, look, design and feel. Again, with enough clarity and disclosure, you can create ads that are not like, say, the Atlantic’s blatant tactics of making its ads almost indistinguishable from its editorial content. Another:

This “sponsored content” on Deadspin was written by a real writer with a byline. The word “sponsored” only appears twice on the page. And there are no comments.

But that’s Gawker. It doesn’t even pretend to be ethical about anything. Another turns the tables:

I’d like to remind you of a post of yours from a few months ago, “A Bigger, Hairier Rom-Com,” about the premiere of Bear City 2. Your disclosure is pretty weak here. “Aaron’s in it” is only sufficient for people who are regular readers who pay attention to your personal life and totally discounts readers who started reading your blog since the last time you mentioned your husband Aaron. I can miss this detail just as easily as glancing over “Sponsored by Brand X” in a by-line.

While there’s a HUGE difference between the advertorials you’ve posted here and your post, it’s not unreasonable to assume that you have a financial incentive to encourage more people to see your spouse’s movie by giving it free publicity. I’m not calling you out, and I don’t think for a second that Aaron twisted your arm or that you had some motive for the post other than “people will like this movie that I liked,” but at the end of the day, your editorial content was advertising. I’m just trying to keep you honest.

Here’s the line in the post in the first paragraph:

Full disclosure: Aaron’s in it. Provincetown is the star. Hence my review.

I don’t know why that is weak. And Aaron has received no money from the movie since it ended production.

The Hawks’ Hyperbole

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4RZO8y-R9k]

The Iraq war began ten years ago this month. Fallows reflects on what the war taught us:

As I think about it this war and others the U.S. has contemplated or entered during my conscious life, I realize how strong is the recurrent pattern of threat inflation. Exactly once in the post-WW II era has the real threat been more ominous than officially portrayed. That was during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the world really came within moments of nuclear destruction.

Otherwise: the “missile gap.” The Gulf of Tonkin. The overall scale of the Soviet menace. Iraq. In each case, the public soberly received official warnings about the imminent threat. In cold retrospect, those warnings were wrong — or contrived, or overblown, or misperceived. Official claims about the evils of these systems were many times justified. Claims about imminent threats were most of the times hyped.

Drum nods. And remember this when you are told Iran is going to nuke Israel imminently. On almost every previous occasion, we have been wrong, or lied to. Here’s another excruciating passage from my war-mongering phase ten years ago this week:

Chatting with a senior member of the administration this weekend, I felt a sense of relief. The president is adamant that Saddam will soon be gone. It will happen. The only option short of war will be Saddam’s exile, or death. I think Saddam understands this, which is why we suddenly have his desperate attempts to show superficial disarmament. But it isn’t enough. It cannot be enough. Maybe if he’d done it three months ago, we could have come to an agreement. But now the moment has passed. The permanent and transparent disarmament we need – the reassurance that the world deserves – cannot be accomplished while that duplicitous monster is in power. We should try for a second U.N. resolution, but we shouldn’t be too disheartened if we don’t get it. When you’re dealing with the likes of Chirac, there can be no secure agreement.

The post was titled: “The Relief Of Action.” The only silver lining is my hope for a second UN resolution. But it never came.

South Park vs Arrested Development

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Comparing the two is a little unfair, since one lasted for a very limited period of time (although I find myself re-watching it all the time). South Park has been going for years and clearly evolved as it grew older. As part of Vulture’s “Sitcom Smackdown,” Julie Klausner considers the two modern classics:

I remember the originality and verve of the very first episode in 1997, and how impressed I was that Trey and Matt Stone came from nowhere — or, as we knew it during those AOL salad days, the Internet. But, also, when I say Matt and Trey came from nowhere, I mean they weren’t from accepted comedy breeding grounds, like the Groundlings or Harvard. They didn’t go to improv class, and they weren’t hanging around with any comedy clique. Their iconoclasm was, and still is, splattered all over the show like — dare I? They would, so very well — diarrhea around the inside of a toilet bowl. And as they’ve maintained the show, those two wunderkinds have managed to stay entirely true to their own credo of “no bullshit,” while continually searching for the next weird, gross, upsetting, outrageous, silly thing — real or imagined — that they can blow up for their next point of departure/no return. …

An excellent bonus about Matt and Trey: Unlike satirists Jon Stewart and Bill Maher, who preach to their own choir, the South Park voice is not only distinctive, it’s truly independent, pissing off liberals and conservatives alike. It’s a breath of Fresh Air that isn’t hosted by Terry Gross.

Meanwhile, Adam K. Raymond lays out a list of every celebrity mocked on the show over 16 seasons.

California Evolves On Marriage

The California Field poll (pdf), released late last week, finds that marriage equality continues to gain support in the state. It’s now at 61 – 32 percent in favor. Drum welcomes the news:

[T]he number approving has gone up from 59 percent to 61 percent in just one year. We’re now very close to the two-thirds tipping point that’s a good rule of thumb for getting major legislation passed consistently. Even as we wait for Proposition 8 to wend its way through the court, it’s pretty obvious that within a year or two it won’t matter. An initiative to make gay marriage legal will barely even be controversial and would pass by a wide margin if it were on the ballot.

I’m not sure that the latest minor movement represents much but statistical noise. But the trend is unmistakable. In 1985, the numbers were almost the exact opposite: 62 – 30 against. That’s a tectonic shift:

In 2011, FiveThirtyEight published a statistical model that used past ballot initiatives as well as data on religious participation to project the vote share in all 50 states and the District of Columbia on hypothetical ballot measures prohibiting same-sex marriage. The model projected that — unlike as in 2008 — California voters would have rejected a same-sex marriage ban had it been on the ballot in November 2012. The latest poll from Field appears to bear that out.

Paying Taxes While Gay

Scott James describes the hell that filing taxes as a gay couple can entail:

In California, as registered domestic partners, we are required by state law to file a joint state tax return as a couple. However, the IRS forbids us from doing the same thing on the federal level. As a result, we must spend thousands of dollars on accounting fees each year to have our taxes done in a hinky fix that the IRS recently dreamt up: we must combine our incomes, split that money, and then file separate returns.

Got that?

But since we aren’t related to each other (in the federal government’s eyes), the IRS did not create a form or system to allow couples to actually comply with this mandate. So far we’ve followed these IRS tax rules twice. One year our returns sailed through, no problem. But for another year’s returns we were both accused of cheating on our taxes. We’ve been fined and threatened (one bigoted IRS worker in even shared with me his personal disdain for gay couples), and we cannot get the matter resolved. Our plea for help from the Taxpayer Advocate’s office has been repeatedly ignored. So far this has cost us more than $20,000.

Working Out The Bugs

Ross Andersen worries about artificial intelligence gaining power over us:

It is tempting to think that programming empathy into an AI would be easy, but designing a friendly machine is more difficult than it looks. You could give it a benevolent goal — something cuddly and utilitarian, like maximising human happiness. But an AI might think that human happiness is a biochemical phenomenon. It might think that flooding your bloodstream with non-lethal doses of heroin is the best way to maximise your happiness. It might also predict that shortsighted humans will fail to see the wisdom of its interventions. It might plan out a sequence of cunning chess moves to insulate itself from resistance. Maybe it would surround itself with impenetrable defences, or maybe it would confine humans — in prisons of undreamt of efficiency.

The Nanny State’s #1 Fan

Cass Sunstein reviews Sarah Conly’s Against Autonomy:

Her starting point is that in light of the recent findings, we should be able to agree that [John Stuart] Mill was quite wrong about the competence of human beings as choosers. “We are too fat, we are too much in debt, and we save too little for the future.” With that claim in mind, Conly insists that coercion should not be ruled out of bounds. She wants to go far beyond nudges. In her view, the appropriate government response to human errors depends not on high-level abstractions about the value of choice, but on pragmatic judgments about the costs and benefits of paternalistic interventions. Even when there is only harm to self, she thinks that government may and indeed must act paternalistically so long as the benefits justify the costs.

One of his major objections:

[I]n my view, she underestimates the possibility that once all benefits and all costs are considered, we will generally be drawn to approaches that preserve freedom of choice. One reason involves the bluntness of coercive paternalism and the sheer diversity of people’s tastes and situations. Some of us care a great deal about the future, while others focus intensely on today and tomorrow. This difference may make perfect sense in light not of some bias toward the present, but of people’s different economic situations, ages, and valuations. Some people eat a lot more than others, and the reason may not be an absence of willpower or a neglect of long-term goals, but sheer enjoyment of food. Our ends are hardly limited to longevity and health; our short-term goals are a large part of what makes life worth living.