Sponsored Content- Here to Stay?

Alyson Fossett

af965610@ohio.edu

Advertising is a huge part of journalism or any kind of print work whether we like it or not. Even though watching a commercial before your YouTube videos isn’t necessarily fun, they serve a purpose that we,  s journalist and PR people,  need to understand and respect.

Advertisements are always changing to try to keep the audience interested.  Before sponsored content, it was tailored ads. Advertisements that were tailored to your specific interests, mine always had to do with volleyball because I was always posting about volleyball and following volleyball pages and buying volleyball gear. This was a clever concept. Made you inclined to click on the ad because they aligned with your interests. Now this new sponsored content advertising is opening the door for many PR firms and also creating talk about ethical decisions.

What is sponsored content? The American Press Institute defined it as:

·       It is generally understood to be content that takes the same form and qualities of a publisher’s original content.

·       It usually serves useful or entertaining information as a way of favorably influencing the perception of the sponsor brand.

So basically it  is content that matches the specific nature of the site so it feels natural and unbiased. BuzzFeed does a really good job using this form of advertising. As Poynter.org explained “They(BuzzFeed) encourage advertisers not to write about themselves and to post content in the style of a fun, grabby BuzzFeed list — the kind of stuff people are coming to the site for anyway”. Sponsored content should fit the culture of the publication and “appeal to the publication’s readership.”

John Oliver jokes on his show, Last Week Tonight, about sponsored content. Even though he is making funny jabs at the concept he makes some decent points. He talks about how this form of advertising “Might seriously damage trust” because they are “trickery” , people are reading these stories without even realizing there is sponsorship behind then.  He goes on to describe the advertisement strategy, “the ads are baked into content like chocolate chips in a cookie”.

But this innovative form of advertising has started people talking about ethical standards. PSRA.org dives into the ethics discussion in the article The Ethics of Branded Content. The article provided a set of guidelines that the industry should follow when dealing with sponsored content:

1. Disclosure — when you promote branded content, you need to clearly label it as such. Don’t try to sell marketing content as editorial.

2. Allow for real reader comments, like those found on news and opinion pieces. Don’t edit or remove the negative ones only because someone bought and paid for the content.

3. Don’t let it become a substitute for earned media. Just because you post branded content doesn’t mean that you should stop working with the PR community to develop stories that deserve publication.

4. Keep content current. The days of the static news story that’s written once, published and left unchanged are over. Now, stories are constantly updated as information develops. Branded content should be the same way.

5. Respect the non-porous organizational divide — simply put, people on the news staff don’t write, edit or place branded content. That keeps the editorial folks focused on their true, professional news judgment.

These guidelines are a good start but I think that publications need to be careful if they decide to go with sponsored content as their form of advertising. This could potentially lose trust among your audience. I also think that it is important for the readers to understand that this method is here to stay so they should be cautious with what they are reading and believing.