Tag: Sponsored Content

The always-worth-reading Jack Shafer digs up the long history of passing off advertizing as editorial:

Advertisements masquerading as editorial copy date back at least to the late 19th century, when they were called “reading notices,” according to the Encyclopedia of American Journalism. Publishers encouraged the placement of reading notices, which placed brand and company names in news stories without any disclaimers, because it was more profitable than conventional advertisements.

And the critics then sound uncannily like this blog today:

In his memoirs, Washington Gladden wrote about quitting his job as a reporter at the New York Independent in 1874 because he could not convince the paper to stop publishing reading notices and publisher’s notices that looked like news stories. “They seem to be essentially evil, and a weakness to the paper,” Gladden wrote. “My scruple may be a foolish one, but I cannot overcome it.” (Hat tips to Prof. Ronald R. Rodgers for this and several other historical pointers.) Renowned journalist Charles A. Dana despised the form, too, writing in 1895, “Let every advertisement appear as an advertisement; no sailing under false colors.” His sentiment was shared by many colleagues, including Editor and Publisher, which editorialized against them, and Adolph S. Ochs, owner of the New York Times. Idealistic publisher E.W. Scripps, who founded an ad-free newspaper in Chicago in 1911, thought avoiding unlabeled reading notices made “good business sense.”

But reading notices were considered so effective that one 1908 book on advertising devoted an entire chapter to “Puffs, Reading Notices, Want Advertisements, Etc.” The key to writing a good reading notice, author Albert E. Edgar advised, was duplicity. “A reading notice of any kind has a certain amount of value because the public reads them as matters of news and not as items of advertising.”

The core business model of sponsored content is lying to readers in order to whore out more completely to advertizers. Call that what you will – “advanced advertorial techniques” or “partners” – the better the lie the more effective the ad. The small question is whether media sites whose fundamental goal is deceiving readers eventually render themselves obsolete. As the WSJ’s Gerard Baker puts it:

An advertiser wants to advertise in The Wall Street Journal to be seen and to be associated with a brand like The Wall Street Journal, or The Financial Times or Bloomberg, because those news organizations are respected. If [advertisers] manipulate the digital or print operations of those news organizations, it makes the reader confused as to what is news and what is advertising, and the reader’s trust, the very reason that those advertisers want to advertise in those news organizations, goes away.

Nate Silver gives it eighteen months, tops. I suspect that’s optimistic. By which time no one may be able to tell the difference between an ad and a piece.

“The delivery of relevant messages and cultivating user engagement are important goals, of course. That is the point of advertising, after all. But it’s equally important that advertising not mislead consumers. By presenting ads that resemble editorial content, an advertiser risks implying, deceptively, that the information comes from a nonbiased source,” – Edith Ramirez, the chairwoman of the F.T.C.

“The word ‘advertisement’ tells people what is being done to them. The whole point of the word ‘sponsored’ is to avoid calling it what it is,” – Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group.

Farhad Manjoo joins the fight against sponsored content (WSJ):

There’s a host of research showing that people are good B.S. detectors; we’re naturally, justifiably more skeptical of paid messages than unpaid ones. And, over time, we notice advertising cues and begin to ignore messages that look like ads. That’s why ad formats lose their effectiveness. It’s why you barely notice Web banner ads, billboards, and TV ads, and it’s why advertisers keep paying more to have their brands woven deeper into content. When ads appear as part of content (as in product placement), they sneak past our defenses; they don’t look like ads, so we aren’t as skeptical of them.

The online-ad marketplace is ferociously competitive, and given the wild scramble for ad dollars among Google, Facebook, and Twitter, not to mention smaller media sites, advertisers are in a position to keep asking sites for more. If they begin to notice that ads marked “sponsored” aren’t doing as well as they used to, they’ll demand fainter disclosure, and they’ll get it.

Yglesias is more worried about the likes of Mike Allen. Recent Dish along those lines here.

Chait reflects on the new Mike Allen take-down:

Playbook goes beyond the routine and wildly promiscuous use of native advertising. Indeed, the behavior Wemple documents would ordinarily amount to a scandal and a likely firing offense, except that it seems to be Allen’s essential job description. As Wemple points out, some of the advertisers are also Allen’s friends. And, of course, his sources also consist significantly of his friends.

The intermingling of media, business, and elected officials that is on gross display once a year during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and which Politico both covers and participates in with peerless enthusiasm, is Allen’s vision of how journalism is supposed to function normally. Sources, friends, and sponsors all blur into one mutually protective circle. Last year, Allen gave breathless, PR-esque coverage to Fix the Debt, the pillar of respectable establishmentarian lobbying, and then, within days, announced that the group was sponsoring Playbook. …

The Mike Allen scandal is not that advertisers purchased favorable coverage in Playbook. The scandal is that, at this point, such corruption is unnecessary.

Drum sees the story as the “latest example of the press going into full stonewall mode whenever they’re the ones a story is about”:

Of course [Editor-in-Chief John] Harris refused to say anything. It’s standard journalistic practice. It’s only other people who have to answer questions. It’s outrageous to expect news organizations themselves to do the same.

If the corruption is no longer a scandal, then surely a paper’s refusal to answer serious questions about its ethics is. By what right does Politico demand accountability from those in power, while refusing to engage in even a modicum of accountability itself? The lack of response must lead any objective person to believe the worst: that Playbook is neither ethical nor journalism. More from the Columbia Journalism Review:

Allen is DC’s access journalist par excellence, which is saying something in that town. Most beat journalists toss off the occasional beat sweetener/source greaser to gain access to a newsmaker and soft-pedal negative news to maintain that access. Access is a kind of currency: Get it and you can break news and rub elbows with important people. Allen makes this ugly sausage-making process more corrupt by mixing access currency with actual currency. Buy native ads in Playbook, get embarrassingly favorable news coverage in Playbook.

It stinks to high heaven.

Earlier this week, Forbes put out a “World’s Most Powerful People” list with Putin at the top. I wasn’t kind. (It’s a bit of an epic smackdown, if you want to watch). Simon Tisdall was also gob-smacked:

[T]he praise for Putin from Forbes, a magazine that supposedly champions individual free enterprise, as a man who “has solidified his control over Russia”, is jaw-dropping. If power is to be measured by the successful imposition of authoritarian governance, then surely Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s dictator, should be Forbes’ No 1? On this basis, Saddam Hussein and Joseph Stalin would qualify for emeritus awards.

In point of fact, Putin’s power is largely illusory – a false idol erected and nurtured by a phalanx of Kremlin cronies, and maintained through control of Russia’s fast-depleting oil and gas revenues and an ever more repressive grip on civil society and the media.

The whole farce was obviously a way to get media attention (success!) but also an obvious product of Obama derangement syndrome. Some people cannot see foreign policy in anything but crude schoolyard terms – in which case, Obama’s willingness to give Putin the Syria WMD brief was clearly a sign of the president’s comparative weakness. This vote was obviously designed to stick the president in the eye. And have you looked at Forbes lately? They make Buzzfeed look like a virgin when it comes to advertorial.

More to the point, we’ve seen that Russia’s oversight has – so far – resulted in an unexpected success in destroying the chemical weapons sites by the deadline, which is today. You won’t hear that on Fox – but it’s a huge success. Obama’s avoidance of getting dragged into Syria’s civil war was obviously a wise move; to get an end to Syria’s WMDs at the same time is pretty damn cool. The outcome was a win-win for both Obama and Putin – and the world. And Obama made it happen. Not so powerless after all.

Clearly-not-a-reader writes:

I work for Cision, a global pr/marketing software company. We are looking for sites who have “sponsored content” opportunities, much like advertorials. I was hoping you could tell me whether you and your site The Dish accept sponsored content written by or for brands. If you do, I would love to learn about how much you charge, get your contact information, and get a better understanding of the program so that I can pass that information on to the 10,000 clients of Cision. Thank you for your time.

Meanwhile, David Carr finds a web ad guru who is beginning to wonder whether “sponsored content” might be a mistake for journalism, paving the way for its destruction:

“I completely understand the value of native advertising,” Mr. McCambley said, “but there are a number of publishers who are allowing P.R. firms and advertising agencies direct access to their content management systems and allowing them to publish directly to the site. I think that is a huge mistake. “It is a very slippery slope and could kill journalism if publishers aren’t careful,” he said.

He’s right. Publishers might build a revenue ledge through innovation of the advertising format, but the confusion that makes it work often diminishes the host publication’s credibility.

Business models that treat journalism as a tool primarily for advertisers will kill journalism in the end. Because I mean by journalism not a platform for entertaining corporate-sponsored listicles, but an established fourth estate that readers trust as independent, transparent, and truth-seeking. If journalism is so enmeshed in selling things that ads and editorial are one hard-to-define mush, then its core value – independent editorial judgment – is inevitably debased.

Of course, this may not matter to those who, like the business geniuses behind Forbes, Buzzfeed, the Atlantic et al, are concerned above all with profits. Journalism, for many of them, is just a means to money. Which means, if they keep calling the shots, journalism is in danger of disappearing quietly, like a law repealing itself.

Update from a reader:

A point of clarification about that contact from Cision. That was most likely not a marketing message. Cision maintains a online database of information about media outlets, including online sites. Included in that database of information would be confirmation if that site accepts sponsored content. People like me use that information to determine if we can approach an outlet to place sponsored content. They were probably contacting you just to update their database.

A reader writes:

Huff post currently has a sponsored post about PRO-natural gas. They are always posting anti-natural gas stuff on the website, and that’s clearly where they stand. But they still accepted sponsorship for something that goes against their supposed values.

Maybe that’s a brilliant new ad strategy: take a position, unnerve your opponents, and then get them to pay you to run their views in a form that looks almost exactly the same as regular editorial copy. The only flaw in this strategy is running your own position in the first place without getting money for it. Maybe the next phase of sponsored content will go to the next level: websites entertaining bids for paid “articles” for any point of view whatsoever. Then you can let the editorial staff go. The business side can always manage the pro and con paid pieces … and would anyone notice anyway?