Web-era advertorials’ sinister effect on editorial content

Native advertising, according to Twitter, is "a more seamless and less intrusive ad experience for users", which certainly sounds lovely. That's why it is "excited" to have picked up a native advertising outfit called Namo Media. Through this acquisition and their purchase of another firm, MoPub, Twitter wants to help bring "the best native ads platform" to app developers and publishers. For web and app users, that means more native ads.

Native advertising is jargon for the web-era equivalent of print advertorials. Native ads show up in what are usually the editorial content areas of web pages or apps. They mirror, to various degrees, the format and appearance of that editorial content in a bid to borrow some of its authority and independence.

Not everyone is a fan of the disguise. Native advertising, according to BBC News economics editor Robert Peston, is a "terrible Orwellian Newspeak phrase for ads that look like impartial editorial". Native ads, as he defined them in a blunt lecture last week, could be articles or videos that appear on a news site but are produced by a brand, or they could be articles or videos about a brand that are produced by the journalists of a news organisation but are sponsored by that brand. (The difference between the two types as outlined is either important or semantic, depending on who you ask.)

Native ads will be labelled something like “sponsored content”, he noted. “But it is very easy to miss this signposting when the article simply pops up in the middle of a run of stories on a website. As a reader, you have to be on your guard to distinguish the native ads from the proper journalism. And many of us may well be in too much of a rush most of the time when online to notice the distinction. Which is, I fear, pernicious.”

Journalists, including those employed by for-profit companies rather than the BBC, tend to be protective of things like editorial control. They fight to have native ads placed not “in the middle of a run of stories” but in some dead-end corner. Battles are waged over which fonts are acceptable and which are too close to the “proper journalism” fonts for comfort.

But while journalists might be expected to dislike native ads, they are not the only ones who do. "I think it's trying to hoodwink the reader," says Ciarán Walsh, founder of digital ad start-up Sweatshop Media and co-owner of the Le Cool franchise in Ireland. "It's not even a new idea," he told The Irish Times. "It just feels like smoke and mirrors. It has become buzzwordy, but it is advertorial at the end of the day."

Enthusiasm for native advertising betrays "a slightly buccaneering attitude to editorial integrity", according to Stephen Quinn, veteran publishing director of British Vogue. "Modern business, I'm afraid, is a lot about greed," he concluded at a recent Magazines Ireland conference in Dublin.

Vogue makes most of Condé Nast's profits in the UK. It is a premium brand that can afford to say no to advertisers and advertisements it doesn't like - other media outlets might not have that luxury. Yet it was hard not to come away thinking that, if the publisher of a consumer bible such as Vogue is concerned about editorial integrity, companies that pride themselves as purveyors of news absolutely should be.

In Peston’s analysis, native ads are part of a clever-but-sinister continuum that could make consumers question their relationship with the whole media brand. “Over time the impression may be created that all editorial is for sale, and none of it is to be trusted,” he said.

He went on to distance himself from what he called “the rise of a generation of managers schooled only in the etiquette of the internet, where the idea that editorial staff should be quarantined from marketing and advertising is seen as absurd”.

Quinn, meanwhile, conceded that to younger people he might sound “massively cranky and old-fashioned”.

Some do argue that native ads are not about trickery and even that consumers are "open to great content, regardless of whether it comes from a brand", as Rhona Murphy, managing director of US web-only publication the Daily Beast, told the Magazines Ireland event. It is true that native ads are, as Twitter says, less intrusive than some other ad types.

But the main counter-argument to the “native ads are bad” line is one of sad, market reality. Once digital media publishers wed themselves to a subscription-free model of doing business, they reduce their bargaining power and advertisers will push the boundaries because they know that they can. Ultimately, the bigger problem for news organisations may not be native ads but the fact that companies such as Twitter are using native ads to grab more of the pie.