mk428915@ohio.edu
Talking about truth in advertising is a very tricky subject in the digital era. Truth can be related to the amount of people who are actually viewing media purchased by advertisement agencies, or truth can relate to what is being said in the advertisement itself. And even when an advertisement is honest and has truly landed on screens of real people there are still countless ethical issues that can occur.
According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), "federal law says that ad must be truthful, not misleading, and, when appropriate, backed by scientific evidence," and this refers to all ads "whether it's on the internet, radio or television or anywhere else." So with this in mind, all digital advertisements should be truthful with no exception, and for the most part, this is the case. However, the digital advertising space's honesty comes into question in regards to impressions.
Impressions in this case means the amount of views an online advertisement receives from users. This is how an agency measures the success of an advertisement and how companies are directed to spend their money online. But impressions are not always real. In fact, impressions frequently are just bot, or in other words fake, accounts that will never result in any return on investment for the company that shelled out the money to buy the creative. This is what is known as data fraud, and this is a major issue in the digital marketing space that has not yet been solved.
So even though corporations are being held to an extremely high standard as monitored by the FTC, the websites that supply analytics to the ad agencies continue to lie and boost the amount of impressions per post, therefore earning them more money from advertisers. When it is broken down, this is basic theft of marketers' money, yet nothing has been done about it. And if digital marketing wants to continue to grow to the size of traditional advertising platforms, there will need to be some sort of regulation on accounts on Facebook and Google in order to ensure that not only the customers, but also the marketers, are being told the truth.
Courtesy of go-digital.net
Aside from the need for marketers to know the truth about how well their advertisements are doing in the online sphere, they should also know that consumers are simply getting fed up with ads. And while the customers have been getting annoyed with ads since ads existed, in the digital age, they now have to power to stop seeing ads altogether. In fact, both Android and Apple phones offer software to block advertisements so users no longer have to be bombarded with pop-ups and annoying videos. But what does this mean for the marketer? Online spending is becoming increasingly prevalent while simultaneously television and radio use is declining heavily, so the desire to advertise online grows everyday; but now users have the ability to shield themselves from paid messages.
As a result, marketers will now have to turn to organic growth online to gain a following an project their message. This means that advertising will move from paying per audience member, to working harder on the content itself to attract new customers. While this may seem appealing to consumers, this will be much more challenging to monitor and regulate. Since it is not technically an advertisement, but instead, a creative piece of content that is created by a company, does the FTC have the right to regulate it? As this new form of online content becomes more popular it will be interesting to see how truthful the content is, and how then, the FTC, and the public will react.
However, in any case, the ethical thing to do for any company, journalist, or online provider to do, is to tell the truth and nothing but the truth under all circumstances.
No comments:
Post a Comment