Media Brands Shy Away From the A-Word, When It Comes to Labeling Native Ads

Media executives insist their native ads are always clearly labeled to avoid confusing readers over which articles came purely from editorial staff and which content an advertiser paid to produce and run. But an analysis of two dozen news and lifestyle sites, social media platforms and popular mobile apps shows that none of the companies that rely on this strategy for ad revenue actually refers to them in a way most recognizable to consumers: advertisement. Instead, they lean on a variety of terms, such as "sponsored," "promoted" or "presented by." That's partly a reflection of the regulatory landscape. The Federal Trade Commission called publishers down to Washington, D.C. in December 2013 to discuss native advertising, but they simply advised media owners to make clear that something is an ad. The organization stopped short of issuing a mandate on exactly how the ads should be labeled. A native ad is a piece of content -- could be text, video or a collection of images -- that more or less looks like a site's editorial work except an advertiser actually paid to create it. A July 2014 survey from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PR firm Edelman found that only 41% of consumers said native ads on a general news sites were clearly identified as paid for by a brand. Native advertising is too often an "attempt to confuse the source of the content," said Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor at City University of New York. Publishing executivess uniformly disagree with the assertion that they're trying to dupe readers. Native ads fit with readers' consumption habits, especially on mobile, where content is delivered in a feed, they argue. They also insist fooling readers will only anger and alienate them. And the reason they don't call them "advertisements" is because they say it's not an accurate description. The Daily Beast, for example, calls its native ads "sponsored content." Mike Dyer, the Beast's managing director-chief product and strategy officer, said referring to these posts as an "advertisement" would be a misrepresentation. "A great display ad will divert people's attention from what they sought out to do," he explained. "Content is the thing people are seeking out. It is the end of the behavior chain." That might be so, but marketers are also keen on labels that avoid the A-word. During a panel at the American Magazine Media Conference in 2013, Brent Poer, president of the Starcom MediaVest agency LiquidThread North America, said setting native ads apart from editorial content is akin to putting a "scarlet A" on the posts. Here's how nearly two dozen media companies label their native ads at the article page level or, in the case of social networks on the list, how these ads are labeled in the stream of content. In several cases, a native ad carries multiple labels, as noted below. Click the word "example" beneath each publication or app listed to see what these native ads look like in the wild.

Media Brands Shy Away From the A-Word, When It Comes to Labeling Native Ads

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