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Native advertising is heralded by many as the future of marketing and the savior of print publishing, but many others have concerns about its ethics and efficacy. As the content line continues to blur, marketers and publishers are working to define their roles and keep consumer trust intact. By Molly Soat | staff writer
 msoat@ama.org May 2015 | marketing news
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ative advertising is, according to many experts, simply a new way of describing the age-old advertorial. It’s a new spin on an old concept: giving readers well-written content that also happens to paint a company’s brand, thought leaders, products or services in a favorable light. But while the advertorials and sponsored content of yore were blatantly branded and distinctly promotional, some of today’s native advertising masquerades as journalistic copy. More and more of it even is written by editorial teams at vaunted publications such as those under Condé Nast’s esteemed umbrella. We’ve reached an inflection point where advertisers hooked on content marketing’s potential are trying to connect with potential customers via useful content that goes well beyond promoting a brand’s wares, and publishers are grasping at straws in an attempt to keep their ad revenue streams flowing. Both parties can benefit, but both also need to play by rules that are palatable to the marketplace. Consumers don’t want to feel hoodwinked, publishers don’t want to damage their editorial content’s credibility, and companies don’t want to invest in marketing efforts that fail to generate favorable returns—or worse, that sully their brands by positioning them as the ones doing the aforementioned hoodwinking. With these concerns in mind, experts agree that the marketing and publishing industries have to create guidelines that allow marketers to push the envelope on
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messaging and promotions, and publishers to keep their ad revenue streams intact, all while keeping customers’ trust top of mind via an approach that ensures shared responsibility for delivering clearly delineated sponsored content that might engage consumers but makes no bones about where it comes from.
What Brought Publishers to the Table Native ads come in many forms, such as promoted search listings and in-feed sponsored tweets or posts, but for simplicity’s sake, we’re focusing on native ads in the form of sponsored content or ad-driven editorial in offline and online publications. Some such content is written by the advertisers, themselves, while other content (and an increasing amount of it) is written for advertisers by a publication’s staff—either its ad team, or a faction of its editorial team. There’s a reason why Condé Nast would be so bold as to cross the embattled line between advertising and editorial, recently announcing that editorial staffers across its portfolio of publications would be assigned to help advertisers write sponsored copy in keeping with the magazines’ content. Based on content’s power to sell, the marketplace these days is attempting to take a more sophisticated approach to such advertorials, and those efforts are attracting attention. “The battle for eyeballs pushes the news industry in extreme ways,” says Beth Monaghan, principal and co-founder of Waltham, Mass.-based social content agency Inkhouse, which creates custom content for companies’ social media channels. “You have to do something to rise above the din of all of the Facebook and Twitter feeds, and 24-hour news cycles. Everyone is figuring out how to do that. Right now, native ads are working. As consumers become more informed, they might stop working. Who knows?” Native ads work because, by their very nature, they’re serving up inherently promotional content that adheres to a particular publication’s style and topic areas. In other words, they offer readers potentially useful information packaged in a way that those readers have already deemed to be palatable. The sponsored content is intended to look, feel and sound like the content that readers bought the magazine for or visited the website for in the first place, which is why more and more publications are willing to work with advertisers to create such content, says Britt Fero, executive vice president and head of strategy at the Seattle office of New York-based
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ad agency Publicis. “[Advertisers] are not asking you to sway from what the core of your publication is all about. We want to add value to your readers, so let’s work together to do that. Yes, I want to bring my brand’s story into that but not in a way that’s disrespectful of what your editorial content is all about because the reason we’re talking is that I value your editorial content, as do the people I’m trying to connect with.” According to Fero, native ads are especially effective in print because the editorial standards in magazines remain high—higher than many websites, she says—but publishers have to figure out how to offer advertisers the same native ad opportunities that digital publications offer to stay relevant and, in some cases, buoyant.
conundrum for both publishers and advertisers: For the advertiser to benefit, the content can’t seem too much like an ad, but in order to preserve the publisher’s credibility, the ad-driven content has to be clearly labeled as such. Experts say that this is the main sticking point, and that each case is unique, so guidelines are nearly impossible to standardize beyond, “Don’t deceive the reader.” At this point, Fero says, we’re still in the “I can’t define it, but I’ll know it when I see it” phase. According to the American Society of Magazine Editors’ previous but longstanding ethical guidelines, the No. 1 rule was not to place an ad on a print magazine’s cover. The ASME updated its guidelines in April 2015, but some magazine publishers
“Print publications have always had really high editorial standards, and that’s the beauty of them, but as brands increasingly are doing content marketing and native ads through digital channels, you want them to have that same opportunity with you.”
began breaking this rule well beforehand. That isn’t surprising, says Bill Duggan, group executive vice president of the New York-based Association of National Advertisers (ANA). As the digital space is forcing magazine publishers to rethink their ad strategies, they also must rethink the once hard-andfast rules on ad placement and design. “I’d say that rule was written before the proliferation of the Internet,” he says. “It was a rule written in a bygone era, which might be an overstatement, but it was written before the competition of the Internet. That rule has to be rewritten or there will be companies going out of business that haven’t already.”
Crossing the Line Native ads are designed to blend seamlessly with the content that surrounds them, but this poses an ethical
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ASME Acknowledges Blurred Lines On April 15, 2015, the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) officially updated its editorial guidelines. The updated guidelines no longer include many of the previously specific rules about where and how ads should appear online and in print. Below is a comparison of the previous and current editorial guidelines set forth by the ASME. The former guidelines were separated into rules about print and rules about digital. The updated guidelines make no such distinctions. Old Guidelines Print guidelines were laid out in 10 rules and digital guidelines were laid out in seven rules. Most of these rules were focused on the specifics of keeping editorial content and ads clearly distinguishable. The rules were pulled from Magazine.org, ASME’s website, pre-update and appear here verbatim. (“Edit” is an abbreviation for “editorial.”) Print guidelines: 1. Don’t print ads on covers. 2. Don’t print ad logos on edit pages. 3. Don’t allow ads to imitate edit. 4. Label ads that resemble edit. 5. Don’t accept sponsorships for regularly published edit. 6. Explain sponsored sections to readers. 7. Avoid adjacencies that suggest conflict of interest. 8. Don’t accept product placement. 9. Don’t ask editors to write ads. 10. Don’t allow advertisers to approve edit.
Digital guidelines: 1. Separate ads from edit. 2. Label native advertising. 3. Differentiate sponsored microsites from edit sites. 4. Allow users to close interruptive ads. 5. Identify paid links. 6. Disclose e-commerce partnerships. 7. Differentiate edit and ads on tablets.
New Guidelines The new guidelines are much more general and begin by acknowledging “today’s advertisingsupported media”: “In a rapidly changing media marketplace, no one set of guidelines can answer every question. The ASME Guidelines address only the critical challenges encountered by print and digital journalists working in today’s advertising-supported media. The basic principles that inform the guidelines, especially transparency, are also applicable to other forms of magazine media, including conferences and events.” The revisions lay out six main guidelines, with no numbering system, implying that all guidelines are equally important: • The primary responsibility of the editor is to serve the interests of the reader. • Avoid conflicts of interest. • Differentiate editorial content and advertising. • Do not trade editorial coverage for advertising. • Do not submit editorial content to advertisers for approval. • Disclose e-commerce partnerships.
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While some experts say that the black-and-white guidelines that dictated how editorial and ads would be written and laid out in print may be blurring, some publishers that have crossed the line have paid for it with negative press. A notable example was The Atlantic’s decision to run a native ad written by the Church of Scientology in January 2013 and to subsequently edit the comments section of that native ad online to delete any critical commentary. In a more recent example, Forbes ran a teaser for a native ad section sponsored by Fidelity on its February 2015 issue cover, designing and positioning the teaser to resemble a regular editorial “cover line.” Backlash ensued not only because of the cover placement, but also because of the wording of the native-ad designation. The section was called “Fidelity Voice,” which is not nearly as clear to readers as “Sponsored by Fidelity,” Duggan says. “It’s an interesting experiment that Forbes is doing on this cover,” Monaghan says. “If you designate what’s sponsored and what’s not sponsored, theoretically, you are keeping that church and state separation, but the waters are going to get a lot murkier before they become clear. Clarity is always important, especially when you’re blurring the lines between what people are used to and what they’re not.”
Historical Precedent Clarity in how to distinguish unbiased content (journalism) from biased content (ad-driven content) has been a publishing concern for decades. As far back as newspapers go, the line had to be drawn between advertisements and editorial, since advertisements paid for editorial to be published, but readers believed that advertiser-created content might be less trustworthy than content written by a newspaper’s staff. Advertisers have an agenda, after all, and upstanding newspapermen don’t— or at least shouldn’t. When subscriptions became the main sources of revenue rather than one-off editions, trust and loyalty drove readership, not attention-grabbing headlines. Consumer protection is upheld by government bodies like the Federal Trade Commission, but those bodies leave it up to publishers and advertisers to deal with the far murkier domain of journalistic ethics, says C. Lee Peeler, president and CEO of the New York-based Advertising Self-Regulatory Council (ASRC). Readers, then, have to trust the publishers because if they don’t, they won’t read the publication or see the ads, and everyone loses.
Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, the 1914 document that still guides any FTC regulations today, prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” That’s where the FTC begins when evaluating any native advertising, and the operative word is “deceptive.” As long as it’s clear that an advertiser has paid for the creation or placement of the content, it’s fair game as far as the FTC is concerned, Peeler says. In 1968, the FTC expanded upon Section 5, stating that any sponsored content that “uses the format and has the general appearance of a news feature for public information, which purports to give an independent, impartial and unbiased view … [must] clearly and conspicuously disclose that it is an advertisement.” This enforcement looked specifically at a newspaper column that veiled a restaurant ad as a review, and the FTC took into account the holistic look and feel of the newspaper column, not just the language. This practice of considering the overall impression that a reader will have based on both design and editorial continues to shape regulation on native ads today. In 2009, the FTC revised the language to say: “Where there exists a connection between the endorser and the seller of an advertised product that might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement, i.e., the connection is not reasonably expected by the audience, such connection must be fully disclosed.” This applies to bloggers as well as journalists, and it was the first FTC ruling to cover online endorsements. Native ads rarely are classified as endorsements since endorsements are usually fodder for lifestyle and design blogs, but marketers should still take note of that distinction, experts say. In 2013, these online guidelines were expanded even further in a document called “.com Disclosures,” which clarified that the disclosure of sponsor-influenced content has to be made in all media, including shortform media like Twitter. Disclosures must be in close proximity to the sponsored content, meaning within the same tweet or Facebook post. The FTC suggests using hashtags such as #Sponsored or #Ad within sponsored tweets to make the distinction, but there are no hardand-fast rules. According to experts, the gray areas are in regulating what’s “deceptive.” As long as it follows the 2013 guidelines on ad proximity, graphic design and the actual content of the message, it’s up to publishers and advertisers to uphold up-to-date ethical standards and make sure that they’re thinking about how readers will interpret each message. Peeler explains that advertisers and publishers must step into these gray areas and
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Yes, I want to bring my brand’s story into that but not in a way that’s disrespectful of what your editorial content is all about because the reason we’re talking is that I value your editorial content, as do the people I’m trying to connect with.”
and the new frontier of digital native advertising, it’s been a real opportunity for self-regulation to examine different formats against the traditional standard and provide guidance to the industry. By and large, industry members all want to do the right thing.” The FTC only goes so far in policing native ads, and at a certain point, Peeler says, it’s an issue of journalistic ethics, and it’s left to the publisher and the advertiser to strike the right balance. “There are two sets of ethical issues that are raised by native advertising, and the first set—the set that advertising self-regulation and the FTC is concerned with—is this question of making clear whether this speech is paid for or influenced by the product manufacturer,” he says. “That’s the truthfulness and disclosure piece. The second ethical issue that there has been concern about is editorial integrity. At what point does editorial content become influenced by the advertiser? That’s a separate set of issues. The consumer protection issue is making sure that consumers understand who’s speaking to them, and why.”
–Britt Fero, Publicis self-regulate, which has been the norm in the advertising industry for decades. “Advertising self-regulation has always been about the basic issues of truthfulness and disclosure,” he says. “Particularly in this new area
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Keepers of the Flame Journalism education is one of the first defenses against unethical native ad practices, experts say, since many
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journalists, designers and copywriters will come through journalism school and can have the importance of clear delineations ingrained in them. “We certainly teach journalists in training on principles of independence, principles of disclosure and transparency,” says Edward Wasserman, dean of the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert in journalistic and advertising ethics. “It’s not a particularly subtle point to say that advertisements should be clearly labeled as such so that people can make up their own mind on how much credibility the story is worth. The danger comes in, not with the people who are trained in journalism ethics, but from those who aren’t. There are, unfortunately, powerful currents within the media business now that are sweeping away some of these misgivings as old-fashioned.” Wasserman says that it’s up to journalism schools to address both obvious and more subtle points of journalistic and advertising ethics, but the lines are blurred by those who think that digital publishing has changed the basic ethical rules of print. “What you see is some news organizations going toward packaging devices that are almost intended to be ignored,” Wasserman says. “The problem is not so much with people ignoring disclosure standards. It’s in people convincing themselves that these standards no longer apply.” University-trained journalists can help keep publishers honest and advertisers in line, Wasserman says. “What we tell our students is to be very tough about this. It’s very important that writers and publishers are the keepers of the flame, and you’ve got to be very hard-nosed about it. The problem comes in when they leave school and have to figure out what that means in the industry. Those two little words, sponsored content: Does that really undermine all of those other visual cues, and all of those other indications of placement on importance? No.” he says. “It would be nice to see journalists and people who conceive of themselves as honest communicators standing up and saying: ‘This is incompatible with the ethical obligations that I signed on for. I don’t cease to have an obligation to be truthful just because I’m writing copy for you. I have to make sure that what I’m writing for you won’t be used in a way that’s going to mislead people.’ ”
Native Advertising Defined Native ads fall under the content marketing umbrella. Content marketing is any created or curated content that’s shared with customers with the goal of boosting business intelligence, not directly selling offerings. Native advertising, specifically, is content created or sponsored by a brand that blends in with surrounding editorial content, both in voice and design. Some forms of native advertising include: ➤ Sponsored content: Ad-driven and advertiser-sourced articles that resemble the topic focus and general presentation of a magazine or website’s editorial content.
➤ Sponsored blog posts: Posts paid for by an advertiser that tout a product or service through a how-to or opinion blog post.
➤ In-feed sponsored tweets or
posts: Promoted posts on social media are paid for by advertisers and appear prominently in news feeds.
➤ Promoted search listings: Located on search engines and e-commerce sites, promoted search listings bump companies’ listings to the top of search results for a fee.
➤ Recommendation widgets: Recommended articles from websites that have paid a fee to be featured below or alongside related content elsewhere on the Web.
➤ Product placements: A form of native
Who’s Responsible?
advertising in which advertisers pay for story-native exposure in TV shows or movies.
“The trust factor is definitely the biggest challenge,” Monaghan says. “Marketers need the publishing
Information sourced from the American Press Institute, the Content Marketing Institute and Harvard Business Review.
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industry to succeed for advertising to be a viable option. Public relations relies on that, too: We need journalists to succeed. We need that ecosystem to survive. If native advertising helps us do that, we all need to find the right way to do native ads.” For Andy Blau, senior vice president of finance and advertising at New York-based publisher Time Inc., the responsibility to label native ads, and therefore to maintain the trust that the reader has in the publication, is the responsibility of the publisher alone. “The responsibility for the publisher is to ensure that the reader or the viewer knows when they’re receiving editorial content versus an advertisement. As long as they understand what
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At what point does editorial content become influenced by the advertiser? That’s a separate set of issues. The consumer protection issue is making sure that consumers understand who’s speaking to them, and why.”
– C. Lee Peeler, Advertising Self-Regulatory Council the source is and you’re not misleading that reader or viewer, then you haven’t crossed that line. The problem is when they’re confused by what they’re getting, or they don’t even realize that what they’re getting is an ad.” Allison Arden, vice president and publisher at Advertising Age, agrees that it’s the publisher’s job to make sure that native ads don’t cross the line from ad to editorial. “In any new area where there is experimentation, there will be a few examples that test the barriers, and these will give us an
indication of how far we can go and create the basis for best practices,” she says. “Publishers need to determine what makes sense for their particular brand and audience. Does it fit within the context of their environment? Are they adequately labeling the material for their readership or viewership? The answers to these questions will vary widely depending on your brand, your audience and your industry.” Marketers also have a responsibility: to their own brand. Without clear labeling, consumers won’t know that a brand created the content, which defeats the purpose of creating it, Arden says. “It is [the publisher’s] responsibility to be sure we are transparent and properly labeling content in appropriate ways, [but] it’s a shared responsibility,” she says. “It’s a publisher’s responsibility to protect the integrity of their brand and platform. Without that, you lose the respect of your audience and your advertiser. The marketers who want a genuine connection with their customer aren’t looking to fool them, either, so we can often work together on labeling that feels right for everyone. … Our goal is to figure out labeling that is clear to the reader while also not labeling it in such a way that the reader is turned away.” According to Duggan, both the publisher and the marketer are responsible for clear labeling in the eyes of the FTC, which might be all that matters. “The advertiser has to have some accountability because if a publisher does something wrong, it’s not just the publisher who’s admonished.” It’s easiest to share the responsibility between the publisher and advertiser, and to ensure that each party’s role is clear, Monaghan says. Marketers’ responsibility is to develop high-quality content that promotes the brand by promoting its insights into the broader industry, rather than simply promoting its products. Sponsored content should play a distinct role in the marketing portfolio than advertising, she says. Publishers, meanwhile, can provide the platform for such content and can govern the process by which the content is distinguished from regular editorial work. “If we all just focus on creating good content, all of the other pieces fall away,” she says. “If a publisher holds marketers to high standards, then the content will match. If marketers hold themselves to these same high standards, then their content will land. If you’re a content marketer and you do everything right in terms of distributing your content but do everything wrong in terms of creating it, it won’t work. You need to be fixated on what kind of stories your audience wants to hear, and how to tell them in the most compelling way.” m
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