Honesty In Advertising

BY: Weiler Harmon
wh675216@ohio.edu

Transparency and truth seem to be on the way out of our media landscape. With the media still fighting to slowly win back the trust of the American people, journalists have to try harder than ever to get their stories heard. This already tough task becomes even more difficult when advertising come into the equation.

Branded content consumes our daily lives whether we know it or not. It clogs our timelines (one out of every five posts you see on your Instagram is now advertised or sponsored), blankets the sides of our roads and recently, makes it harder to differentiate between ads and articles. For publications, it has become a tricky situation. Although they have always used advertisements to provide a steady flow of income, (especially) traditional forms of media are being forced to rely on sponsors and branded content more than they ever have just to keep their publication alive. However, this can often backfire as some publications or individuals allow branded content that is misleading or even straight up false. 

Social Media Advertising
With social media giants like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter all continuing to grow, advertising continues to grow with them. These platforms offer companies and individuals an easy way to push their product or image. Social media has started to play a larger role in most organization's advertising campaigns than traditional advertising does. On Facebook alone, certain businesses pay over $1,000 daily in order to keep their content relevant.

(Photo Source: Elena Lavey: Getty Images & Wired.com)
https://www.wired.com/story/chrome-extension-calls-out-sponsored-youtube-videos/

Even when companies don't actually publish their own advertisement, they can still fund sponsored articles or videos and branded content, like fake product reviews, through social media influencers and popular accounts. This creates a slippery slope. Often times a Youtuber will positively review a product in a video in exchange for money. For example, GoPro could send its new camera...and $30,000 to a tech review channel in exchange for a positive review video. Obviously, this tactic can mislead viewers and potential customers and can look bad for both parties when details of the transaction(s) are made public. 

Recently, Facebook has been under a lot of criticism for allowing 'misleading' political advertisements to published and kept on it's site. This could potentially affect election campaigns and results; however, Facebook claims that monitoring political advertisement would violate the first amendment. On the contrary, Twitter has decided to ban all political advertisements, forcing politicians to use their own personal accounts to gain traction and spread their message(s) to their followers.

Branded Articles
While social media often allows clear and obvious advertisements, certain publications have decided to blur the line between of sponsored content. According to a study conducted by Bart Wojdynski, director of the digital media, attention, and cognition lab at the University of Georgia, 60 percent of readers did not notice the sponsor disclosure label placed at the top of sponsored articles. This study goes on to claim that only 20 percent of readers knew that they were reading advertising and not objective, editorial content. 

Most companies are well aware of the deceptive nature of advertised articles. If they really wanted the reader to know the content is advertised, they would right "THIS ARTICLE IS A PAID ADVERTISEMENT" in huge letters right above the title of the piece, but they don't. Again this can mislead the public/readers into believing they are receiving useful, impactful information from a trustworthy source when they indeed are not.

Eventually these tactics will catch up to the media outlets and organizations that continue to mislead the American public. Until every publication is straightforward about their advertising codes, it will be almost impossible for them to win back America's trust.