ASME Updates Guidelines, Releases Native Ad Rules

Native advertising is a hot new trend -- so new, in fact, that so far there haven’t been any guidelines for publishers thinking about offering native ad products. But that is beginning to change, thanks to the American Society of Magazine Editors, which has released an updated version of its editorial guidelines with new suggestions for best practices surrounding native advertising.
 
In its updated guidelines, ASME suggests that native advertising “should not use type fonts and graphics resembling those used for editorial content and should be visually separated from editorial content." The source of such content and the affiliation of the authors should be clearly acknowledged.

ASME also suggests that magazine publishers differentiate native ads by labeling them “Sponsor Content,” as well as prefacing or accompanying them with a prominent statement or link to a statement “explaining that the content has been created by a marketer and that the marketer has paid for its publication.”
 
For good or ill, the appeal of native advertising in the eyes of many advertisers is that it resembles editorial content both graphically and in its positioning. Any move to distinguish native ads from editorial content with a different visual appearance and location will necessarily diminish its efficacy and desirability as an advertising channel.
 
In the area of content, although the ASME guidelines make it clear that editorial staff may not create ads themselves, they leave it unclear how much assistance they may give to advertisers creating native advertising content.
 
Like the rest of ASME’s guidelines, the suggested rules are inspired by the industry organization’s basic principles of editorial integrity, including “the value of magazines to advertisers depends on reader trust;” “the difference between editorial content and marketing messages must be transparent;” and “editorial integrity must not be compromised by advertiser influence.”

In practical terms, that means "media consumers should always be able to distinguish between content produced by journalists and content delivered on behalf of advertisers. In other words, no fooling the reader.”
 
Adherence to the ASME rules is strictly voluntary, but publications that run afoul of the industry organization’s guidelines (and refuse to take measures to respond to official ASME complaints) can suffer sanctions, including exclusion from consideration for the National Magazine Awards

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