T.L. Schilling
Any truth in advertising? Depending on who you ask that question of
will determine what kind of answer you get. Let’s face it; money is king
everywhere you turn nowadays, whether you want to believe it or not.
Advertisers and editors want to be able to push the ethical boundaries of
sponsored advertising and in the end; it will be the reader that ultimately
suffer.
What is being called “native” advertising should be just that, something
that is applicable to the content of the story, or “native” to it. What is
being called into question is how the editors and publishers are using some of
the sponsored ads to possibly mislead people to sites that provide information
that is not relevant to the story they are reading. I’m not sure how much more
clearly the SPJ Code of Ethics
can state it when it says that journalists should: “Distinguish news from advertising and shun hybrids that blur the
lines between the two. Prominently label sponsored content.”
One of the most highly publicized examples of the bad side of sponsored
advertising is what happened at the Atlantic:
Source: Seriously Simple Marketing
According to the story on the Seriously Simple Marketing site, the link it provided went to a story about, what the
headline of the story said: “David Miscavage leads Scientology to milestone
year.” By linking this story the way they did, it gave the appearance that the
Atlantic may be endorsing Scientology. As a result of the onslaught of reader
emails, Twitter feeds, and Face Book rants, the Atlantic removed it from the
page and replaced it with something in part that read that they “removed the ad
and were reviewing their ad policies.”
Is making it more transparent really the answer? Does it make it any
less wrong to direct me somewhere I do not want to go to? For the most part,
the website Buzz Feed, is said
to make good use of sponsored advertising while being transparent about it.
Source: LinkedIn
There is the fine line of trying to help the reader accomplish whatever
their goal is of reading the story and selfless, unethical promotion.
Obviously, if someone is paying an exorbitant amount of money for their content
to be prominently shown on a webpage page, they want people to know who can
help them. The issue is when does it become too much? To me, it is like the
pop-up ads that appear on a web page and it takes 2 minutes to find the very
tiny “X” to close it. It is frustrating and it not what I came to that
particular page for.
As a reader, give me what I want and make it clear. Do not hide your intentions
or make me peruse useless information because of your lack of ethics. Quit
making me search for a way to close out the very annoying pop-up ads that keep
wasting my time searching for the ever elusive close tab. Sometimes it not even
an “X”, but some other variation, whatever it is, it is non value added to me.
I like how you mentioned the way Buzzfeed presents their sponsored content. I touched on the same process in my own blog post! While researching the various ways of providing sponsored content, I did find that I prefer the “Buzzfeed way” rather than the other, more popular pop-up ads. Like you had mentioned, it’s very frustrating to visit a page to be confronted by an annoying pop up ad that is difficult to close, or like on YouTube when ads are played before the video and you can’t always skip them. I personally like the way the Buzzfeed content is displayed because it gives you the option to click on the article yourself, and view the content yourself – not presenting it in a pushy manner like other sites. While ads can be annoying in general, I would much rather have something that I can control rather than pop up ads that I can’t close.
ReplyDeleteKayla Burke
kb297015@ohio.edu