BuzzFeed and evolving advertising

Sam Schooler
ss521013@ohio.edu

I joined Facebook six months ago.

Yes, seriously.

Facebook hit it big while I was still in junior high. One month everyone was on MySpace and the next it was Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. I held off because I was very invested in teenage apathy, and then I held off because hel-lo, I didn’t want my parents to see what I talked about with my friends!

http://www.postadvertising.com/2012/11/why-most-native-advertising-will-fail/

I finally caved because I was leaving my old university to move to OU, and I couldn’t stand to lose track of all my friends. When I joined Facebook, I expected a lot of selfies, angsty attention-begging status updates—and don’t get me wrong, that’s what I got. But I also got ads tailored to me.

Eerily so.

I set my relationship status to “engaged,” and suddenly all the ads on my little side banner were for wedding companies insisting they’d help me pick the perfect cake, send out the perfect save-the-dates and even exchange my ring if I didn’t like the one my girlfriend bought for me. That was to be expected, right? It was a Facebook status, after all.

Then I Googled Iron Man 3 trailers, and the next day Marvel ads had mixed in with the wedding companies. I started to pay attention to the tooled advertising—and I noticed it other places, too. I’ve become recently addicted to BuzzFeed, and as soon as I began to spend time on their website, I saw ads for their articles elsewhere.

BuzzFeed’s own algorithm for native advertising is suave and effective. The site as a whole operates on a flow system, getting the reader to move from one article to the next to the next while, of course, exposing the reader to a roster of articles with similar topics. BuzzFeed works like Facebook does, but better; I noticed right off the bat when Facebook started catering to my Googling habits. BuzzFeed is smarter: Its content masquerades as normal content—the epitome of native advertising.

Advertising as an industry has gotten slicker. In a recent episode of Teen Wolf, werewolf character Isaac sassed an FBI agent while casually eating from a box of Ice Breakers. Did I notice the Ice Breakers? Well, yeah—the actor purposefully turned them in his hand so the screen caught a glimpse. Did it bother me? No.

Product placement in TV shows and films, like Facebook ads, is obvious when it happens, but advertisers have learned to downplay it. No one mentions brands anymore. Maybe everyone in a show drives a Ford car. Maybe everyone drinks Woodchuck during a bar scene. Maybe a faux-casual teenage werewolf eats Ice Breakers while talking about his dead parents.

Is downplaying it enough, though? BuzzFeed operates on a sneakier pattern—one that’s becoming more and more used and accepted in the journalism world. With online articles, linked or sponsored content and clever advertising is easier. A funny post about bad autocorrects has the carrier names of the screengrabs phone users left in place. In a recent Forbes article, Forbes alleges that new content creators like BuzzFeed are actually pioneering a type of native advertising that is not only extremely effective, but tailored specifically to that type of content.

So maybe Facebook and TV shows aren’t to blame for their slightly-more-obvious advertising. Is it just that sites like BuzzFeed have evolved to a better platform? The general consensus is yes. Online content creation sites and online newspapers have more expansive advertising opportunities now than ever before; the tricky part is taking advantage of them.