Commentary

NAD: Qualcomm Campaign Over, Sponsored Articles Can Run Without Sponsor Tag

by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, October 1, 2013

In its first case involving native advertising, the Better Business Bureau's National Advertising Division has cleared Qualcomm for its role in sponsoring a high-profile campaign that ran on Mashable.

The campaign involved 20 editorial articles, which dealt with topics like Tesla cars, electric guitars and music synthesizers. The articles, which originally were posted between November 2012 and this March, are still live on Mashable. Initially, the articles indicated they were “supported” by Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors; each piece also originally ran with ads for Snapdragon. But the articles also were written by Mashable staff independent of the Qualcomm sponsorship.After Qualcomm's ad campaign ended, so did the notification that the company had “sponsored” the articles. The disappearance of that information raised eyebrows at the NAD -- which itself challenged Qualcomm. Specifically, the NAD decided to examine whether Qualcomm had an ongoing obligation to inform readers know about the sponsorship.

In this case, the NAD said that Qualcomm did not need to take any further steps to “identify itself as the sponsor after the sponsorship period ended.”

But the NAD also pointed out that this campaign had some unique qualities that lent itself to that decision. Among others, Mashable created the articles before the sponsorship started, according to the NAD. Also, the articles themselves never mentioned Snapdragon -- though the pieces nevertheless indirectly promoted the company by generating “curiosity in the technology,” according to the NAD.

Obviously, not all examples of sponsored content will be similar to the Mashable articles. The far more likely scenario involves advertisers commissioning content, rather than sponsoring articles that have already been written.

Either way, the NAD isn't the last word on this subject. The Federal Trade Commission -- which has already weighed in on endorsements in blogs -- is holding a workshop on native advertising on Dec. 4.