Theodore L. Glasser, Sheng Zou, and Anita Varma
Native advertising and fake news are two sides of the same coin. Both involve phony journalism and both involve the production of counterfeit news. Like fake news, native advertising succeeds as it deceives; both masquerade as content judged by journalists to be acceptable and appropriate. A form of covert marketing as pernicious as the fabricated facts of fake news, native advertising tries to fool the public not by pretending to be true, but by pretending to be authentic.1
Unlike fake news, however, which finds no sanctuary among reputable journalists, native advertising enjoys a quiet acquiescence in many newsrooms. Indeed, some of the oldest and most prestigious news organizations in the United States and elsewhere—the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian, among many others—not only accommodate native advertising, but produce it as well. For example, the New York Times’ T Brand Studio, the newspaper’s “brand marketing unit” with a “global network” of offices in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong, uses the newspaper’s “proven recipe for storytelling” to create and distribute “stories that influence the influential.”2 This, of course, raises the question: What does the newsroom create and distribute if not stories that influence the influential? Tellingly, the pitch to advertisers bears a striking resemblance to a pitch to the Pulitzer board: here’s a story that makes a difference.
That both types of content—material produced by its newsroom and material produced by its marketing unit—meet the Times’ exacting standards of quality, particularly its standards of style, and thus deserve the Times’ imprimatur obscures the fact that marketing material eludes the judgment of journalists, judgments that account for not only the quality of content but its value as well. Native advertising invites us to forget that advertising advances the commercial interests of the advertiser and only coincidentally the interests of the public.
Understood as content of purposely unclear provenance, native advertising benefits from a deliberate lack of clarity about where journalism ends and commercialism begins; it exploits the problematic distinction between “journalism” and what the New York Times calls “a journalistic approach” to crafting stories; it flourishes amid the “blurred content boundaries” that bedevil online journalism. In short, native advertising stakes a place for itself as vanishing lines and crumbling walls leave journalists without the markers that for nearly two centuries defined, metaphorically, the ethics and ethos of Western journalism.3
Advocates of native advertising position themselves as entrepreneurs who view native advertising as an innovative—and lucrative—alternative to banner ads, pop-up ads, autoplay videos, and other obtrusive, disruptive, and altogether annoying (and not very profitable) forms of web-based marketing. They regard the lines and walls that separate advertising from other content as arbitrary, antiquated, and antithetical to native advertising’s basic premise: sites with integrated content of high quality trump sites with segregated content of mixed quality. Critics, however, contend that whatever the quality of its content, native advertising depends on deception, an egregious breach of ethics. They point out, as journalists do in their coverage of other distressed industries, that the vagaries of the marketplace do not justify dishonesty; economics does not trump ethics. While proponents of native advertising believe that explicit and conspicuous disclosures, as required by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), remedy any legal or ethical concerns, opponents believe that disclosures do not undo deceit; they merely acknowledge it. Mark Coddington usefully sums up native advertising’s “core tension” as the “inherent conflict” between “blurring the boundary between news and advertising” and at the same time “creating more compelling advertising that’s honestly labeled.”4
The conflict reveals itself in what Coddington calls the “rhetoric of survival,” illustrated by a News Corp executive who views critics of native advertising as scolds who “would rather hide behind ossified church and state walls with absolute positions than find flexible ways to protect both journalism and the business of journalism.”5 The rhetoric of survival preys on the fear that journalism cannot succeed unless it succeeds as a business; a well-worn fiction contradicted by the scores of new and successful news sites unaffected by the exigencies of market forces. It also invites journalists to embrace, in the name of success, the prospects for an unprecedented role for advertising: “Instead of editorial content being used to attract audiences who are then exposed to advertising, advertising itself begins to attract audiences.”6 Advertising would continue to subsidize news and other editorial content, as it has since the 1830s, but now, “wearing the uniform of journalism, mimicking the storytelling aesthetics of its host site,” it would not be easily distinguishable from the content adjacent to it.7 Put in starker terms, protecting both journalism and the business of journalism now comes with the expectation that journalists will accept the idea of a seamless news site that mingles their content with stylistically identical content produced by advertisers.
Notwithstanding its prehistory in the form of advertorials in newspapers and infomercials on radio and television, native advertising’s near ubiquity,8 particularly online, signals a new and different understanding of journalism’s interest in advertising, namely, a willingness to work with advertisers as partners, not simply clients. We expand on this with a brief account of journalism’s deliberate abuse of disclosures, which we take as evidence of a lack of commitment to reveal native advertising as advertising—and a missed opportunity for an important media literacy lesson: with rare exceptions, advertising has no public purpose analogous to journalism’s public purpose. We conclude with an even briefer discussion of how we might quarantine native advertising in ways that wouldn’t readily apply to other forms of counterfeit news.
News executives defend practices of native advertising on the grounds that disclosure mitigates deception, and the FTC condones native advertising as long as it is clearly labeled.9 However, the FTC does not mandate that advertisers use the word advertising in those labels. From a marketing perspective, native advertising loses its value if it loses its stealth status through explicit disclosure,10 which is why news outlets publishing native advertising prefer euphemistic terms such as sponsored, promoted, and paid post. Yet, as discussed below, this latitude in nomenclature for labels results not only in deceiving consumers, but also in breeding consumer distrust of news outlets.
The use of euphemistic terms to refer to native ads has become a common practice. A review of native advisements for sixty-three publishers reveals that the most commonly used terms are sponsored, presented by, sponsor story, and sponsored story.11 The argument could be made that sponsored and advertising are synonymous, but there is little evidence to support such a defense. For example, in an eye-tracking survey in which advertisements with different labels appeared on a website, native ads labeled “advertisement” were viewed less often by participants (23 percent) compared to other labels, which respondents saw more frequently, such as “brought to you by” (24 percent), “promoted by” (26 percent), “sponsored by” (29 percent), and “presented by” (39 percent).12 This is likely because people tend to avoid advertising, and these other labels are less likely to be understood as advertising. The integrative format of native advertising is less likely to trigger consumer awareness of the persuasive intent of native advertising.13
In fact, in an online experiment, only 17 percent of 443 participants correctly identified material labeled “sponsored content” as native advertising.14 Even a disclosure label is insufficient for signaling to the audience the commercial nature of the advertising material.15 In a separate experiment, 598 respondents were shown a simulated blog page with three articles, one of which was a native advertisement labeled as “sponsored report.” Even with the disclosure label, 27 percent of the respondents thought a journalist or reporter wrote the native ad. Terms such as sponsored are too ambiguous to serve as disclosure, for they do not necessarily mean “advertising” but apply to other funding situations, as in the case of sponsors for public programming. Thus, it is evident that consumers are not thoroughly informed through existing disclosure practices.
Furthermore, when readers do recognize articles as native advertising, it leads to unfavorable perceptions of article quality and unfavorable attitudes toward sponsors.16 And if the advertisement disguised as news comes from a trusted journalistic outlet, individual attitudes toward the news outlet become more negative overall.17 This suggests that, far from viewing native advertising as an innocuous storytelling format, readers who recognize native advertising as such view it as grounds for being skeptical or distrustful of the news outlet’s coverage.18 Native advertising is thus a lose-lose-lose situation: ineffective disclosure deceives readers into believing that content is journalistic when it is not, effective disclosure obliterates native advertising’s unique value proposition (unobtrusiveness) for brands, and reader awareness of native advertising destabilizes the perceived legitimacy and trustworthiness of news outlets.
Native advertising and fake news take different paths to the same place: the land of counterfeit news. Fake news gets there by virtue of its lack of veracity. Native advertising gets there by virtue of its lack of authenticity. Their different paths, as well as their different pathologies, explain the vastly different responses to them. No one celebrates fake news as a worthwhile endeavor; with two possible exceptions—as satire and as a weapon used to confuse an enemy of the state—no one sees a legitimate public purpose for it. In contrast, native advertising, while controversial, garners considerable praise from owners and managers of news sites, who are understandably eager to accommodate a new revenue stream that might head off the trend toward fewer and smaller newsrooms, and from advertisers, who are understandably delighted with the prospect of taking an unassuming “journalistic approach” to getting their story out.
If we can’t legally eliminate counterfeit news—at least not in the United States—we can regulate some of it. As a matter of U.S. law, more can be done to protect us from advertising that is deceptive than from news that is false. Commercial speech (like native advertising) receives less constitutional protection than noncommercial speech (like fake news), which makes room for the FTC and other administrative agencies to promulgate rules and regulations designed to protect the public from commercial content that pretends to be something else. To be sure, the FTC has the authority to demand, though not the resources to monitor, the use of what it calls “clear and conspicuous” disclosure, a requirement designed to quarantine advertising in ways that make clear that an ad is an ad.19
Arguably illegal and decidedly unethical, the disingenuous use of disclosures, where news sites make it a point to identify an advertisement as an advertisement without using the word advertisement underscores the intractable conflict between candor and deception, between journalism and the business of journalism. As a matter of ethics, news sites populated with native advertising owe the public more than disclosures of marginal efficacy. If we accept the proposition that deception, like lying, is presumptively wrong, then the burden is on the deceiver to justify the deception.20 And the justification must move beyond the rationalizations associated with the rhetoric of survival, where journalists and others are bullied into accepting an otherwise unacceptable arrangement on the grounds that their jobs, their profession, hang in the balance. In our deep dive into the literature on native advertising—books, articles, papers, magazines (popular and trade), websites—we found nothing close to what publishers of native advertising owe the public: a morally rigorous defense of publishing material that intentionally appears to be what they know it’s not.
1. This chapter is based on an earlier article: Theodore L. Glasser, Anita Varma, and Sheng Zou, “Native Advertising and the Cultivation of Counterfeit News,” Journalism 20, no. 1 (2019): 150–153.
2. “About Us,” T Brand Studio, accessed June 17, 2019, http://www.tbrandstudio.com/about-us/.
3 “Marketing,” The New York Times Company, accessed June 17, 2019, https://www.nytco.com/careers/marketing/; Matt Carlson, “When News Sites Go Native: Redefining the Advertising-Editorial Divide in Response to Native Advertising,” Journalism 16, no. 7 (2015): 862.
4. Mark Coddington, “The Wall Becomes a Curtain: Revisiting Journalism’s News-Business Boundary,” in Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices and Participation, ed. Matt Carlson and Seth C. Lewis (New York: Routledge, 2015), 76–77.
5. Ibid.
6. Carlson, “When News Sites Go Native,” 861.
7. David Carr, “Storytelling Ads May Be Journalism’s New Peril,” New York Times, September 15, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/16/business/media/storytelling-ads-may-be-journalisms-new-peril.html.
8. Now a global phenomenon, native advertising has its own international trade association, Native Advertising Institute, based in Copenhagen.
9. Federal Trade Commission,.com Disclosures: How to Make Effective Disclosures in Digital Advertising (Washington, DC: Federal Trade Commission, 2013), https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-releases/ftc-staff-revises-online-advertising-disclosure-guidelines/130312dotcomdisclosures.pdf; Federal Trade Commission, “Native Advertising: A Guide for Businesses,” December 2015, https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/native-advertising-guide-business.
10. Ellen Goodman, “Stealth Marketing and Editorial Integrity,” Texas Law Review 85 (2006): 83–152.
11. Lucia Moses, “The Publishers That May Need to Change Their Native Ads under New FTC Rules,” Digiday, December 24, 2015, https://digiday.com/media/publishers-may-need-change-native-ads-new-ftc-rules/.
12. Lucia Moses, “How Native Advertising Labeling Confuses People, in 5 Charts,” Digiday, May 4, 2015, https://digiday.com/media/5-charts-show-problem-native-ad-disclosure/.
13. Sunny J. Kim and Jeffrey T. Hancock, “How Advertorials Deactivate Advertising Schema: MTurk-Based Experiments to Examine Persuasion Tactics and Outcomes in Health Advertisements,” Communication Research 44, no. 7 (2016): 1019–1045; Miceal Dahlén, and Mats Edenius, “When Is Advertising Advertising? Comparing Responses to Non-traditional and Traditional Advertising Media,” Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising 29, no. 1 (2007): 33–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/10641734.2007.10505206.
14. Michelle A. Amazeen and Bartosz W. Wojdynski, “The Effects of Disclosure Format on Native Advertising Recognition and Audience Perceptions of Legacy and Online News Publishers,” Journalism, February 7, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918754829.
15. Chris J. Hoofnagle and Eduard Meleshinsky, “Native Advertising and Endorsement: Schema, Source-Based Misleadingness, and Omission of Material Facts,” Technology Science, December 15, 2015, http://techscience.org/a/2015121503/.
16. Bartosz W. Wojdynski, “The Deceptiveness of Sponsored News Articles: How Readers Recognize and Perceive Native Advertising,” American Behavioral Scientist 60, no. 12 (2016): 1475–1491.
17. Michelle A. Amazeen and Ashley R. Muddiman, “Saving Media or Trading on Trust? The Effect of Native Advertising on Audience Perceptions of Legacy and Online News Publishers,” Digital Journalism 6, no. 2 (2018): 176–195, https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2017.1293488; Amazeen and Wojdynski, “Effects of Disclosure.”
18. Goodman, “Stealth Marketing and Editorial Integrity.”
19. “Full Disclosure,” Federal Trade Commission, September 23, 2014, https:www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2014/09/full-disclosure.
20. Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (New York: Random House, 1978).