(Jack Shafer is a Reuters columnist but his opinions are his
own.)
By Jack Shafer
March 8 (Reuters) – The Washington Post’s website joined the
sponsored-content stampede early this week with the introduction
of its BrandConnect Web product, making it the first major U.S.
newspaper to embrace sponsored content, according to Digiday.
Other high-profile Web publishers selling sponsored content
include Gawker, Huffington Post, Business Insider, Forbes,
BuzzFeed, Slate, Cheezburger, Techmeme and The Atlantic.
Meanwhile, Fortune magazine is creating Fortune-branded
content “for marketers to distribute on their own platforms,”
AdWeek reports.
Also known as native advertising, the current wave of
sponsored content on the Web can resemble the advertorial
sections you’re familiar with – the ponderous Russia Today and
China Daily pages in the print editions of the Post and the New
York Times, which nobody reads, and those sections in glossy
magazines you automatically skip. Or, it can look remarkably
like the content the site already produces. BuzzFeed has created
pages for Virgin Mobile, Pillsbury, Coca-Cola, Dell, the Nevada
Commission on Tourism and General Electric that could pass for
its standard pages as they use jokes to “subtly weave in the
values of the brand,” as the Wall Street Journal reported last
October. BuzzFeed sponsored content costs about $20,000 for five
or six “articles,” reports Digiday.
If, as George Orwell once put it, “The public are swine;
advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket,”
then sponsored content is the meal so wretched that even pigs
will reject unless sugar-frosted.
The average sponsored-content page pits the advertiser
against the publisher. The former attempts to make his copy and
art look as much like conventional news or feature copy as
powerfully as the latter pushes back as hard as he can to
preserve “editorial integrity” without forfeiting the maximum
fee. It’s common for both sides to come away from the
transaction feeling soiled and swindled, but, hey, that’s the
nature of most advertising.
The Wall Street Journal reports that an estimated $1.56
billion worth of BuzzFeed-style sponsorships will be sold this
year, so the rush to created sponsored content is not a fool’s
errand. But after stuffing myself with every example of
sponsored content I could find this morning, I found myself
nodding in agreement with All Things D reporter Peter Kafka, who
recently wrote a column titled “‘Sponsor Content’ Doesn’t Fool
Anyone Except Advertisers.”
The first example of BrandConnect in the Post – “Mobile
Revving Up Rural Economies” – couldn’t possibly have hoodwinked
the client, wireless trade association CTIA or anybody else.
You’d have to be an idiot to mistake it for a Post story, or for
something you need to read. Unlike the BuzzFeed sponsored
content, the CTIA sponsored content contains no sugar. It’s a
heaping helping of salt that’s been salt-cured.
You can smell the desperation when nosing about in sponsored
content. Publishers know that banner advertising doesn’t work
for their clients. As the Journal notes, banner-ads’ share of
Web advertising is shrinking, and they must devise new
advertising forms to attract ad revenue.
But as The Atlantic learned in January after running a
Scientology ad that looked too much like regular Atlantic fare,
sponsored pages carry a potential downside that’s greater than
traditional “proximity advertising.”
Proximity ads place commercial messages next to editorial
copy, but they’re boxed and printed in such a fashion
(non-editorial typefaces, for example) to reduce the chance that
readers will confuse ads with news. It’s equally important to
advertising-supported journalism that the news not be confused
with the ads that run nearby, a point Benjamin Franklin made in
his advertising manifesto in his 1731 “Apology for Printers.”
Franklin held, and most publishers continue to hold, that
the controversy raised in news stories is desirable, should not
be held against advertisers, and the content of advertisement
should not automatically be held against the newspaper
publishing them.
When Web publishers deliberately blur the visual and textual
divide that separates editorial from advertising, as The
Atlantic did, they force readers to judge whether a page is
news/opinion or a commercial advertisement.
But they’re not confused. It’s the publisher and the
advertiser who are confused. The publishers and advertisers have
polluted their own tradition by erasing the traditional line.
Suddenly, it’s completely reasonable for readers to blame
controversial news stories directly on advertisers and blame
controversial advertisements directly on reporters and editors,
because publishers and advertisers have essentially merged
operations.
Such calamities injure both publisher and advertiser, even
already controversial advertisers like Scientology. (In The
Atlantic’s defense, it should be noted that it ultimately
conceded that it “screwed up” the presentation of its
advertisers message and promised to do better in the future.)
The Atlantic debacle hasn’t stilled the enthusiasm of Web
publishers for sponsored content. Lewis DVorkin of Forbes, an
early promulgator of sponsored content, continues to bang his
drum for it. He claims 20 partners (SAP, UPS, Harris Bank, et
al.) for Forbes’s “BrandVoice.” It’s enough to make you
barricade yourself behind Orwell’s collected works when DVorkin
approvingly quotes his chief revenue officer’s quip about
BrandVoice: “It’s not an ad, it’s thought leadership.”
No, Lewis. If money moved from the client’s hand to that of
Forbes, and Forbes posted the client’s copy, it’s an ad.
What Web publishers fear most, I guess, is that as the
banner-ad revenue fades and Web ad-rates fall, they must board
the sponsored content express now, before advertisers will start
to disintermediate them by produce their own entertaining,
branded content, as BMW, McDonald’s and Volkswagen have. This
terror of being left behind, I surmise, is what drove The
Atlantic into posting its lampoonable Scientology advertorial.
I may be an editorial-advertising radical, but I’m not an
absolutist. I’ve never feared advertising that advertises itself
as advertising. I’m prepared to accept that an advertiser could
produce content worthy of my time, though I’ve yet to witness
that miracle.
I don’t even fear “thought leadership,” as long as the
wallet financing the composition and promulgation of the
thoughts can be identified, as was the case when Herb Schmertz,
Mobil Oil’s vice-president for public affairs, routinely
published his company’s “low-key advocacy ads” on the New York
Times op-ed page beginning in the early 1970s. Just make sure I
can see the line.
As a great wag once said, a newspaper is nothing but an
advertisement with a news story printed on the back. That
arrangement has worked well for American publishers, readers and
advertisers for two centuries. But can it work if you have to
guess which side contains the ad?
(Jack Shafer)
