Let's suppose you were to navigate to the Web site of
ThePhiladelphia Inquirer, a once proud broadsheet that in the extremis of chaos economics will now sell itself for a crack hit.
Or let's say you were to blunder onto
Mediaite, an aggregator that has never demonstrated any dignity to speak of in its brief, content-squatting life.
In either place (and many more) you
might spy a provocative headline. No -- not the one that says “Could this be America's Next Blockbuster Cookbook?” which is pretty obviously a piece of “native advertising”
clickbait sleazily designed to look like ordinary, pandering editorial clickbait. No, not that one.
I’m talking about this: “The End of Barack Obama?”
Also clickbait,
but presented as a standard headline suggesting The Philadelphia Inquirer and Mediaite have created or editorially linked to a piece of journalism. But lo and behold, this
headline doesn’t link to journalism at all -- it links to some dubious, for-profit peddler of doomsday investment strategies.
advertisement
advertisement
Well done, media institutions. You have whored yourselves to
a hustler. Your good name, such that it remains, is diminished accordingly, along with your trustworthiness, integrity and any serious claim to be serving the public. Indeed, by bending over for
commercially motivated third parties who masquerade as bona fide editorial contributors, you evince almost as little respect for the public as you do for yourself.
There’s your native
advertising for you. There’s the revenue savior being embraced by Forbes, the Atlantic, TheWashington Post, TheGuardian, Business
Insider and each week more and more of the publishing world. According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, sponsored content of various kinds was a $1.56 billion category in
2012 and growing fast.
That seems like a big number, but bear in mind that U.S. ad revenue in newspapers and magazines was $40 billion in the same year -- and that (rapidly diminishing) sum
does not create profitability. Which means that publishers are not only selling their souls, they’re barely extending the lives of their businesses in so doing. On the contrary, they are
accelerating their own demise, because no reader will long patronize those who wantonly deal with the devil.
The natives are restless, and also feckless.
There would be nothing wrong
with native advertising, of course, if it were clearly demarcated as promotional material created by an advertiser. But it is very seldom clearly demarcated, because that would defeat the very point:
to obscure the content’s commercial adulteration. The only variables are the degree of subterfuge.
Put aside the financial scammers and similar megasleazebags for a moment. Let’s
think instead about the most common label currently affixed adjacent to native advertising in the name of supposed transparency: “Sponsored Content.” Those words tell us next to nothing,
and certainly not the plain truth. The word “content” itself invites the audience to confuse such stuff with editorial matter created by journalists maintaining an arm’s-length
relationship with the subject. And “sponsored” doesn’t reveal much, either.
Isn’t genuine editorial matter also sponsored content? Yes, in the 300-year-old mass
media/mass marketing covenant, the audience has always gotten the content for free (or heavily subsidized) and the advertisers have picked up the tab. But within that covenant, till now, it has been
deemed categorically unethical for the advertiser to so much as influence the editorial, much less blur the lines between the advertising and the journalism.
Yes, I know. I know. Much of the
magazine industry has been a brothel for a century. But not the news and public affairs part of it. And while some local newspapers have been intimidated by their big car-dealer, real-estate and
supermarket advertisers, the firewall between the journalists and the business side at newspapers and news magazines of quality has been largely sacrosanct.
Until the chaos scenario began.
As the business models of magazines and newspapers collapsed, the firewalls toppled, too. It’s a tragedy and a surprise; I had thought they were, in the architecture of journalism, extensions
of the foundation.
None of this handwringing and gnashing of teeth is to suggest there is no future for branded content. If anything, digital disintermediation means that marketers no longer
need third-party publishers to reach an audience. And more on that subject coming soon in this space. The question for now is what to do now. But it is no conundrum, nor structural problem, nor
Gordian knot. Nope. It’s simple:
Disclosure.
Next week’s column will propose exactly how. But till then, here’s a brief hint. You know that “End of
Obama?” headline? It ran on the NBC News Web site, too. And I could find in that very little fault. Maybe NBC should be a little more cautious of what ads it's being served by its various
native-ad-network partners, but there was the doomsday link along the right rail…
… in a box, with a blue screen above it, and three different versions of the word
“ad.”