Last year, Sony’s marketing department found itself playing defense when the venerable New York Times refused its latest ad campaign, one that had run in such notable publications as The Wall Street Journal and CBS Marketwatch.com.
The campaign, which featured a number of “news” articles written about “real people” and how the latest technology had changed their lives, couldn’t quite make it onto the NYT’s pages, web or print, due in large part because Sony refused to have its advertisements labeled as such to the degree the editors insisted.
What’s worth noting here isn’t that Sony spent $10 million on an ad campaign meant to deceive readers, but instead that an editorial board drew an ethical line in the sand and stuck to it.
Anyone who’s ever read a newspaper, magazine or gone online to get their news has come across what has become known as “advertorials.” Technically, advertorials are advertisements that have the appearance of a news article or editorial. Ethically, they bedevil editorial boards at an increasing pace as advertisers continue to tap into a void of clear media policy for the alarming trend.
Case in point: some of the advertisements in this paper. They come complete with a bold headline, news-style copy and even a dateline. If the reader looks close enough, in the bottom right corner the label “advertisement” is there, albeit in a miniscule point size.
So who cares? For trained journalists and editors, the implications of running advertisements that mimic actual news articles are frightening. Print and online media attract readers (and advertisers) through accurate, fair and balanced reporting. Advertisers pay to interrupt the flow of information from the reporter to the consumer through display ads, classified ads and full-page advertisements.
Put simply, businesses buy the space on the page and consumers buy their products if the ad is provocative enough to entice the consumer away from reading the information and into responding to the ad’s message.
Advertorials blur the line between advertising and editorial space, especially when they are not clearly labeled. The negative impact this blurring has on the media goes back to Journalism 101 in that the press must not only be accurate, but fair and balanced.
By an advertorial’s very nature, even if every assertion in it is true, the scale of perspective is unabashedly tipped favorably toward the advertiser.
And while editors would love to believe that readers are smart enough to distinguish advertorial from newsprint, study after study points to the contrary.
A recent study by Dongguk University and the University of Alabama bluntly stated that the “advertorial format fools readers into greater involvement with the advertising message and that the presence of advertorial labels may not be particularly effective in alerting consumers to the true nature of the message.”
Advertisers have caught on. This company recently received an ad submission that dictated it run in the editorial section with a “font style and size to be same size as that of other editorial stories.”
In a product where journalists strive to provide fair, accurate and balanced news articles, mounting evidence that advertorials and all of their skewed portrayals may be given the same weight by readers is unsettling at best. But for advertisers and their clients, these findings are worth their weight in gold.
This journalist/editor has tried in vain for the past two months to steer this company’s policy toward that conciliatory grassy knoll on the outskirts of ethics and on the edge of outright deceit. On that knoll, advertorials would be allowed to be placed anywhere, as long they have a border and are labeled as an advertisement at the top.
And so this ethical dilemma for journalists will persist. No, the Peninsula Beacon and La Jolla Village News are not the New York Times and never will be, but they are newspapers and their editors share the same concerns with editors in newsrooms of all sizes, budgets and levels of veneration.
It’s all a numbers game, so as advertisers increasingly push advertorials on newsrooms that have yet to develop a unified policy, the numbers of disguised advertisements will also increase, and with it, the exploitation of your subconscious reception.
” Jason Wells is the editor of the Peninsula Beacon. His opinions do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial staff or publishers.