{"id":644958,"date":"2013-03-02T08:06:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-02T13:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paidcontent.org\/?p=225394"},"modified":"2013-03-02T08:06:00","modified_gmt":"2013-03-02T13:06:00","slug":"when-advertising-becomes-content-who-wins-advertisers-or-publishers-or-both","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/644958","title":{"rendered":"When advertising becomes content, who wins \u2014 advertisers or publishers, or both?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrew Sullivan, the former Daily Beast writer who recently launched<\/a> his own standalone publishing venture, has made it pretty clear that he doesn\u2019t like advertising, which is why his site is supported entirely by reader subscriptions. And he also made it clear in a recent series of posts<\/a> that he doesn\u2019t like the growing trend of sites like BuzzFeed using what they call \u201csponsored content\u201d as a replacement for traditional advertising \u2014 something he suggested was ethically questionable for media entities of all kinds. <\/p>\n

Like it or not, however, this phenomenon is becoming more and more commonplace \u2014 and not just at new-media ventures like BuzzFeed but also at traditional publishers like The Atlantic<\/em><\/a>. Is it the savior of online media, or just another mirage in the advertising desert? This is a question we are going to discussing at length at paidContent Live in New York<\/a> on April 17, including a panel entitled \u201cThe future of native advertising: Blurring ads and content.\u201d<\/p>\n

If it\u2019s useful, does it matter if it\u2019s sponsored?<\/h2>\n

The principle behind what some call sponsored content and others refer to as \u201cnative advertising\u201d<\/a> (and newspapers and magazines called \u201cadvertorial\u201d) is that marketing messages and other forms of advertising are more successful when they look and feel just like the other content that surrounds them, rather than an annoying and\/or irrelevant interruption. If you can make your message useful, the theory goes, then users are more likely to click or remember.<\/p>\n

\"Twitter<\/a><\/p>\n

The most obvious example of this is the kind of advertising that both Twitter and Facebook offer: namely, features like \u201cpromoted tweets\u201d<\/a> and \u201csponsored stories.\u201d They appear in a user\u2019s stream just like any other status update or message, but they are advertising that is based on \u2014 and in some cases even includes \u2014 the activity of a user around specific topics (although Facebook\u2019s version has caused some controversy<\/a> over the inclusion of status updates).<\/p>\n

BuzzFeed, whose president Jon Steinberg will be on our paidContent Live panel, is one of the leading proponents of this concept: co-founder Jonah Peretti has talked about how the startup decided from the beginning not to use<\/a> traditional banner ads and other forms of advertising, but to pin its hopes on sponsored content. But critics like Sullivan have complained that the sponsored content is too hard to distinguish from the regular content at BuzzFeed.<\/p>\n

Another form of native advertising is the kind that Forbes<\/em> magazine specializes in, with its BrandVoice program. In a nutshell, the magazine provides marketers and advertisers with a platform that is indistinguishable<\/a> \u2014 apart from the brand names and disclaimers that are posted on their pages \u2014 from the content that appears elsewhere on the magazine\u2019s website.<\/p>\n

Advertising is just another form of media<\/h2>\n

\"Advertising,<\/a><\/p>\n

Forbes<\/em>\u2018 chief product officer Lewis D\u2019Vorkin, who will also be on our panel at paidContent Live, has written about the idea behind this platform, and the idea is that branded or marketing-related content should be given a status that is equal to that<\/a> of the magazine\u2019s traditional content, and that it should succeed or fail based on whether it is actually useful to readers or not. So the blog written by someone who works for a brand or corporate sponsor looks and functions almost exactly the same as any other blog written by a Forbes<\/em> staffer.<\/p>\n

A whole separate category of sponsored content or native advertising is what some marketers like to call \u201cbrand journalism,\u201d and Kyle Monson of Knock Twice<\/a> \u2014 a former journalist who used to run the \u201cbrand journalism\u201d practice at JWT in New York \u2014 is going to be on our paidContent Live panel talking about that. This approach sees brands like Coca-Cola and Qualcomm<\/a> and Intel creating their own content or journalism around topics that are of interest to their customers, without making it explicitly an advertising message.<\/p>\n

So with brands becoming publishers and producing \u201cbrand journalism,\u201d where does that leave traditional media companies? And are the blurring lines between sponsored content and traditional media a problem, or are critics like Andrew Sullivan just reluctant to embrace this new way of doing things online? Those are just some of the questions we will be tackling at paidContent Live<\/a> on April 17, so I hope you can join us<\/a> to continue the debate.<\/p>\n

\"paidContent<\/a><\/p>\n

Image courtesy of Shutterstock \/ Gl0ck<\/a> and The Everett Collection<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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