Transparency is Key

Kaitlin Heneghan
kh416415@ohio.edu

Cartoon by Tom Fishburn.
https://marketoonist.com/2013/09/branded-content.html

Advertising plays a major role with publications. Whether it is digital or print, publications will always look to place advertisements as a source of money. Branded content is a way for advertisers to spread awareness by moving away from traditional advertisements. It can be editorial, images, videos, etc. It's different from traditional advertising such as billboards, banners and commercials because it is more engaging, and sometimes interactive, to the consumer.

An example of affective branded content is Dove's Real Beauty Sketches on YouTube. This campaign went viral with over 9 million views. The commercial showed Dove's value as a brand in a way that was engaging and made viewers feel emotional after watching the video. In this case, Dove's form of branded content worked very well. But was it ethical?

Branded content has caused controversy about it's ethicality. In the article What is Branded Content and is it Ethical? statistics are provided to give an idea of how people felt about if branded content is ethical or not. A very small percentage of PR professionals saw branded content as somewhat to very unethical. The biggest reason for it to be unethical is that it can misguide the consumer. While other reasons could be that it reduces the media's credibility or weaken authenticity. There have been rules and guidelines to help these potential risks of a branded ad being unethical.

According to the ASME, for branded advertisements to be published within a publication, print or digital, there must be an indication somewhere that it is a special advertisement. Not only does the ad need to say somewhere it is a special ad, but it also can not follow the style guides of the publication. For example, I interned at a magazine this past summer as a designer for the publication. One spread I designed was for a medical advertisement. There was a label at the top of the page that said "special advertisement section" on every page of the story. I also had to use certain fonts that was different from the regular body copy of the magazine. In this case I think that the publication I designed for went about this advertisement in an ethical way. They also have special advertisements in the front of the book that clearly states it's an advertisement section, uses different paper than the magazine and different fonts.

If this was not the case for this publications way of showing special advertisements, readers could be misguided, and our credibility in storytelling could be lost. For Dove's campaign, I think they went about it an ethical way because they went through themselves as a brand and did not ask for another company to promote this sort of branded content. There is a line with branded content that is very between it being ethical and unethical. This type of branding will always be around with how effective it has become, so transparency is key. As long as publications or any sort of company that is associating itself with branded content makes it aware that it is branded content the ethics about it should be okay.