Native Advertising and Women's Magazines

Adrienne Green 
ag881210@ohio.edu

The debate about native advertising or “sponsored content” is one that has been central to the media industry. Many legacy media outlets have struggled in recent years to balance their ethical codes that explicitly state that advertising and editorial content should be separate and distinct, with the ever-increasing need to used advertising as a form of revenue. While native advertising is an innovative answer to the money question, it introduces many challenges associated with marketers having the opportunity to play in the sacred editorial space.

The mix challenges the editorial independence of the publication and reader trust.

Women’s magazines and their readers

In many instances, readers subscribe to or frequent a publication because it’s values, tone and voice align with their personal identity in some manner. This becomes especially true with women’s interest and fashion magazines, whose demographic often turn to these publications for honest guidance about what to do, buy, wear, and where to go. Female readers of this type put an enormous amount of trust in the fashion, beauty and self care advice put forth by these magazines. Companies or products that want to utilize the sponsored content method to advertise in magazines like Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, and Women's Health are taking advantage of that reader-editor trust. The mission of the advertiser sponsoring the content is to adapt to the magazine's format, tone and style to create content that readers enjoy similarly to editorial content.

Even the editorial content of fashion and beauty pages in women's magazines are their own discreet form of advertising. Pages and pages are devoted to expensive designer items, accessories, fragrances, hair and makeup products. These magazines are famous for promoting, displaying, and advertising their favorite products for that month as a part of their editorial formula. This format makes it easy for advertisers of these products to seamlessly blend their advertising into the editorial content by placing the advertisement next to editorial content that positively favors their product (a very common practice). 

This is problematic, not simply because advertisers are attempting to mask their agendas as legitimate content-- readers can often times tell. The problem that arises is that women's interest and fashion magazines promote consumption, probably more than other types of magazines that are focused on news or more niche topics. Brands like Glamour and Elle base most of their content on recommending products for women to buy to have the best make-up or the most fashionable closet or new diet product. If their editorial content is pushing people to consume these products and advertisers are adopting fashion magazine format, these readers may be increasingly more susceptible to paying attention to these ads as though they are still under the recommendation of the editorials that the advertisements mirror.

An example of taking advertising to new levels happened when Marie Claire magazine used their innovative zip cover for their August 2014 Denim Issue, which was sponsored by Guess (a maker of denim) on the inside flaps. 

Separate But Equal? 

Many news organizations, like Buzzfeed, have decided that in an attempt to maintain the ethics-revenue balance they will separate their editorial team from the creative staff that is producing the advertisements. The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) has followed suit by releasing a statement about native advertising that says:

Editors are reminded that the participation of editorial staff in the creation of advertising is a conflict of interest and should be avoided. Editorial contributors should not participate in the creation of advertising if their work would appear to be an endorsement by the magazine of the advertised product."

While separation best preserves editorial independence, who will make sure that the advertisements that now look like editorial content live up to the journalistic standards of that content if journalists have no hard inter production? ASME, along with others who have suggested regulation for the deceptive native advertising, recommends that the advertising should be clearly distinguished and label from editorial content as to not confuse the readers. How can the advertisements make this clear distinction if their purpose is to capitalize on elements of the actual publication to attract it's readers? 

Many media outlets are worried that without a way to regulate the native advertising, the FTC will come and regulate. These policies would generally be geared to journalism and advertising in the digital space, however, regulation could negatively effect women's magazines and their relationship with fashion and beatify advertisers that sustain them.