Native advertising is the latest buzzword circulating among agencies and publishers. There’s nothing new here; “native” means crafting a marketing message in a format that appears to fit within the organic content, a type of advertorial that has been around for more than 50 years. Early episodes of The Flintstones cartoon, for instance, segued to commercial breaks with Fred and Wilma smoking Winston cigarettes. Advertorial is found in newspapers, where advertisers write “articles” that mimic the look and feel of the print pieces; in movies, product placement sticks a clip about teenage gunners finding food in a Subway restaurant during the middle of a Red Dawn chase scene.
But native is now hot in digital, because web publishers are losing audiences to mobile and ad dollars to DSPs, and they love the new revenue that embedding marketing messages inside their content may provide. Is this bad?
Hell, yes. Advertorial / sponsored content / “native advertising” has always been controversial, largely because its sole purpose is to disguise its source and convince consumers it is an organic part of the entertainment or news they wish to consume. While researching an upcoming Digiday column on this, I surveyed some of our agency’s media buyers for their opinion, and the consensus was, yuck. “Slimy” and “tricky” popped up as descriptors. Such ethical subjectivity may seem strange sourced from a group of people bent on influencing others ... until you realize what “native” really does.
A large part of how human beings judge value is by relying on the opinions of others. This is no theory, but fact: There is too much data in the world for any of us to consume, so we rely on frameworks from other minds to select the information that is most meaningful. This is why Libertarians in love with Ayn Rand will never agree with liberals who listen to MSNBC; at some point in each of our early teen years, we lock in to a framework that helps us understand the world. We embrace a filter for the data noise, and in exchange become a bit rigid in our worldviews.
Frameworks come from people we trust, and we rely on these sources of information to quickly judge each information's value. When a trusted advisor tells you to invest in Google, you do, because you believe she knows what she’s talking about. When your spouse says she is upset about a work incident, you are likely to believe her, because you trust her point of view is more valid than that of her boss. If Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie showed up at your next party and told a joke, you'd likely laugh more than if your cousin Vinnie said the same thing. Sources matter. The reason businesspeople fly on airplanes to meetings, rather than sending simple emails, is they hope their presence as a source will provide more buy-in of their information.
We follow people, not data. We look for origination points, not at the flowing stream.
Why is this so? Believing in sources more than content is likely a survival instinct; our cavemen ancestors, when confronted by uncle Oog screaming a tiger is coming, relied on that source to run quickly without over-thinking it. Those who did, survived, and our source-relying genes remain with us today.
Advertorial and native blur the source of information, and that cognitive dissonance creates trouble for the receiver that bleeds upstream. If Oog was pulling your great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s leg about the tiger, he likely received a beating. But if a social media guru says he loves the latest Blackberry smartphone (client disclosure!), what do you make of that? Is it true? Paid? Is your source valid? You are confused in parsing the data, and that source becomes devalued.
Advertising receives knocks because it is manipulative, but its saving grace is all ads are usually marked as such. When a commercial break comes on TV, you know it’s a bunch of ads in a pod, all trying to shift your opinion, and you can gauge their value as such. But if Tom Hanks hosts the Academy Awards next year and suddenly drinks a Pepsi, you wonder -- did Pepsi pay for that inclusion, and if so, does your love of Mr. Hanks mean you can no longer trust his opinion?
IZEA, Facebook, Twitter, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Quartz, The Huffington Post, are all trying new ways to blur the sources of ads in exchange for more marketing revenue. The pitch is “native advertising” is less disruptive and more valuable because it looks like the other content in the stream. Publishers are hungry for new revenue, as DSPs steal away digital audiences and magazines see declining circulations.
The trouble with native advertising is its pollution is, like all negative externalities, invisible in the beginning, but accumulates until the entire commons is spoiled. Digital advertising, in particular, risks becoming the next telemarketing -- a channel that once worked until too many piled in too slickly, and then audiences rebelled by shutting the entire thing down. At least you know where a banner ad is coming from. With a sponsored story, it’s very hard to tell whether the source is giving you the truth. And when you stop believing in a source, your instinct is to listen to Oog and run away.
Image: Bérenger ZYLA