By Jack Limpert
HBO’s John Oliver says ads are being baked into editorial content like raisins into a cookie.
HBO’s John Oliver did a funny, perceptive 11-minute segment last night on native advertising—it’s well worth watching—and this morning the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple described it this way:
“Oliver took viewers on a quick history lesson through the innovation of blurring the lines between editorial content and advertising content, and then came to this conclusion: ‘I like to think of news and advertising as the separation of guacamole and Twizzlers. Separately they’re good. But if you mix them together, somehow you make both of them really gross.’
“Among those mixing such treats is the New York Times, whose executive vice president of advertising, Meredith Levien, defended native advertising at a conference: ‘Let me start by vigorously refuting the notion that native advertising has to erode consumer trust or compromise the wall that exists between editorial and advertising. Good native advertising is just not meant to be trickery. It’s meant to be publishers sharing storytelling tools with marketers.’
“Oliver jumped in: ‘Exactly, it’s not trickery. It’s sharing storytelling tools. And that’s not bull—-. It’s repurposed bovine waste.'”
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Some background: Native advertising on the web is a lot like the special ad sections that have been the scourge of magazines. Here’s a post from May 31, 2013:
TRYING TO CON THE READER—THEN AND NOW
For those of us who edited magazines 25 years ago, native advertising sounds a lot like what we then called advertorials. Those were sections in a magazine—often 12 or 16 pages—that were a mix of what sort of looked like normal editorial plus ads related to the subject matter. Back then the Washington Post Magazine ran lots of advertorials on cosmetic surgery (the magazine’s editor at the time was a talented journalist who has gone on to bigger things), and the quasi-editorial copy could be anything from helpful information to puffery about an advertiser. A half-dozen of the bigger city and regional magazines—and some national magazines— would run six or seven advertorial sections a month.
The American Society of Magazine Editors tried to police the advertorial sections—here are the ASME Guidelines–and some magazines pushed things close to or over the line by making it hard for readers to know what was real editorial and what was advertorial. At ASME board meetings there was talk about whether magazine X or Y should be barred from the National Magazine Awards because the advertorials weren’t clearly labeled or looked too much like real editorial. I took part in an ASME panel on advertorials and tried to make the case that the sections were the equivalent of pablum, that most of the sections offered nothing useful or interesting to the reader, that they were there only as a bland excuse to sell ads.
At one ASME meeting, Ed Kosner, then the editor of New York magazine, suggested that advertorial sections were okay if the quasi-editorial material was objective (facts and figures) and not subjective (puffery about those running ads). That made a lot of sense then, and still does. One problem, of course, is what marketers see as objective may not be what editors see as objective.
At The Washingtonian we mostly avoided advertorials because we had a strong circulation base and we didn’t want to endanger that by junking up the magazine. There was another issue: At a meeting of city magazine editors, Brian Anderson, then the editor of Mpls. St. Paul magazine, called advertorial sections the dangerous equivalent of heroin. His magazine was running lots of advertorial sections and he said that the magazine’s ad staff had become addicted to the sections, that they claimed they couldn’t sell run-of-book ads, that they needed the crutch of telling the advertiser that their ad would run near copy that would mention them.
So it appeared back then that advertorials might give a short-term boost to ad sales but long-term would weaken the magazine—it was an argument that some business side people understood. As for the editorial side, we hated advertorials, thinking that they were an attempt to con readers, that they would erode reader trust in the magazine, that they were an insult to the intelligence of readers, that long-term they would wreck the magazine.
Back then long-term thinking seemed to make sense.
Here’s a good Advertising Age followup to John Oliver’s 11minutes of let’s-tell-the-truth-about-native-advertising:
http://adage.com/article/media/john-oliver-lampooned-native-advertising/294480/?utm_source=digital_email&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=adage&ttl=1407942095
It includes this from Joanna Coles, editor of Hearst’s Cosmopolitan magazine:
Ms. Coles, whose Cosmopolitan.com flags native ads with labels such as “Cosmopolitan + Revlon” and “Cosmopolitan + Panera Bread,” said it was “fantastic description.”