Native Advertisement is Intentionally Deceptive

Bo Kuhn

bk135717@ohio.edu

Advertising, the idea, has been around for as long as humans have had commerce. Advertising, the industry, is much newer than that and is concerned only with selling more products by any means necessary. Companies will do whatever they have to in order to increase their profit margins, and one easy way they can do that is Native Advertising.

Native Advertising is essentially an advertisement, typically on a media platform of some kind, which is disguised as a typical piece of content one might expect to see from said outlet, except they are getting paid to create it, just like any other advertisement. Here's where this gets dicey: If people are advertised to unknowingly, it undermines the trust relationship between the person and the platform they're being advertised to on. 

Picture source: https://contently.com/2015/09/08/article-or-ad-when-it-comes-to-native-no-one-knows/

Almost 50 percent of people have at some point felt deceived by advertisements, according to Content Strategist. This creates the distrust for platforms I mentioned earlier because consumers hate to feel deceived. The gamble here made by advertisers is that people will fall into the other 50 percent outlined on this graph: those who think they haven't or don't know. The simple fact is that everyone has been deceived by marketing, so thinking you haven't handed the power to corporations to continue deceiving you to make money off of your deception.

An example of deception in native advertising would be back in 2014 when a now-infamous YouTube personality named PewDiePie made a video of him playing a new game called Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor. This is typical content for PewDiePie, but in reality, he was paid to play the game by its publisher, Warner Brothers and they didn't disclose that fact within the video itself or in an otherwise obvious way, and the FTC intervened. The key to the FTC's case was that the disclosure that the video was in fact paid advertisement was hidden in the video's description box, which many viewers don't even see, let alone open and read its contents. This constituted a failure to properly disclose that the video was a paid advertisement, and the FTC ruled that native video advertisement must contain a disclaimer.

I would argue that this is in fact the logical conclusion of Native Advertising and the mission of Advertising in general. In order to maximize your profits, deception is necessary and native advertising is a way to do that, while also making the minimal effort to maintain the relationship between consumers and platforms, or in PewDiePie's case, too minimal an effort.