Advertising's Influence on Journalism

Sara Dowler
sd719116@ohio.edu

Source: cbinsights.com

Advertising. To many, one of life's greatest annoyances. People dislike them to the point that they are even willing to pay to have them removed. Yet, even after shelling out the extra couple bucks per month, we cannot truly escape the effect that they have on us.

Now, not only are advertisers targeting audiences based on demographics but psychographics as well.

For those who may not know the difference, as explained by allbusiness.com, demographics are the characteristics of your audience such as age, gender, occupation, where they live, etc. While psychographics "go beyond the external to focus on your target customers' psychology, lifestyles, and behaviors. Psychographics can include such factors as to where your target customers like to travel on vacation, the kinds of hobbies and interests they have, " etc.

As also explained in this video, while demographics tell advertisers who are buying a product, psychographics tells advertisers why they are buying a product.

This seems harmless, however, like most ethical problems, a gray area soon appears. And for psychographics, this gray area appears even faster when advertisers start using them to try and guess their audience's moods.

While as explained in Emily Bell's article, psychographics does have some beneficial elements such as being "preferable to the type of behavioral and locational tracking that comes from following you around the internet with dozens of pieces of code or cookies...It is also a tactic that doesn't fall foul of existing and potential data privacy rules. If an ad is guessing your mood based on the context of the article, it is just a tweak from the contextual ad targeting which is, in fact, beneficial."

However, psychographics has a dark side. For it is the advertising method used by Cambridge Analytica, the company who misused Facebook data.

This especially affects journalists in the way that as journalism continues to make the move from print to online, journalism will become more and more reliant on online advertisements. So we as journalists need to become more aware of the type of advertisements that can be associated with our content.

So how can we as journalists continue to remain ethical when ethically confusing content is being associated with our own? As always, there is only one thing we can continue to do: remain truthful and transparent.

Much like how Perri Klass describes explaining advertising to children in this article, journalists need to be able to know what audiences are watching and consuming in order to help them understand what the world is throwing at them.

Whether it is another annoying advertisement interrupting a show or another scandal as big as the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, journalists need to be there to inform the public about what they are consuming.

For while we as journalists may not be able to control what kind of advertising content is in the media or is associated with their articles—we can always live and work by the Society for Professional Journalists Code of Ethics and always seek the truth and report it.