Courtesy of BoSacks & The Precision Media Group
America's Oldest e-newsletter est.1993
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Researchers have discovered that chocolate produces some of the same reactions in the brain as marijuana. The researchers also discovered other similarities between the two but can't remember what they are.
Matt Lauer
Dateline: Charlottesville Va
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Researchers looked at nearly 3,000 native ads across five years. Here’s what they found
“We counted all the native advertisements between 2014 and 2019 we could find from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.”
These specific advertisements are called “native advertising,” but are also tagged as “ sponsored content,” “partner post” or other labels consumers don’t understand. They look like news articles, with headlines, photos with captions and polished text. But they are really ads created by, or on behalf of, a paying advertiser.
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Deceiving audiences
These advertisements that look like real news are labeled as ads, as required by the Federal Trade Commission. But research studies have repeatedly shown that those labels are largely ineffective at helping readers distinguish between the two types of content.
Made by journalists
Many media companies have created content studios, separate from their newsrooms, to create native advertising on behalf of corporate and special interest groups. While newspapers traditionally had ad departments that designed and mocked up advertisements for their clients, today’s native ads are in the form of a “story” that often does not focus on — and sometimes does not even mention — its sponsor in order to resemble the seemingly objective journalism it imitates.
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Because native advertising typically has no bylines, most people are unaware that advertisements may be created in such close connection with mainstream newsrooms. Former employees, including a former executive editor of The New York Times, say most publishers are not transparent about it with their audiences. One digital journalist told researchers, “Some people will say the ad is labeled so it’s not bad.
Disappearing disclosures
When native ads are shared on social media, they’re often distributed in ways that further confuse or deceive audiences.
The Wall Street Journal, for instance, has retweeted posts from its Custom Content studio from the same Twitter account that promotes its news content. While this particular retweet disclosed the commercial nature of the original tweet, this is not always the case.
More than half the time, the FTC-required advertising disclosures disappear when the content leaves the publisher’s website and is shared on Facebook and Twitter. For example, when I recently shared an American Petroleum Institute native ad on Twitter, the disclosure disappeared — ea violation of the FTC’s labeling mandate.
Suppressing news coverage?
We counted all the native advertisements between 2014 and 2019 we could find from The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, by looking at native ads those news outlets posted on Twitter and with a custom search process we built on top of Bing. We noted what dates the native ads were published and what company sponsored them.
We also used the GDELT database, which collects online news stories from those three outlets and many other mainstream, partisan, and emerging news sites across the U.S. In that data, we noted the number and dates of news stories naming major companies.
We found 27 companies for which there was enough information in both data sets to make a meaningful connection. For each of those 27 companies, we charted how many mentions they had in news stories over time, and compared those time periods with the timing of that company’s releases of native advertising.
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We found that for 16 of the companies, news coverage noticeably decreased after a native advertisement was published. For just three companies, news coverage noticeably increased after a native ad was published.
Our study found statistically less reporting on Wells Fargo not only within those three elite news organizations but across all U.S. online media following the native advertising campaigns.
Native ads are potentially very deceptive to consumers in their content, their presentation, and how they are shared on social media. Our research does not prove a direct connection, but when we add it to the anecdotes that news management discourages stories critical of important advertisers, we also wonder about the power of native ads over journalists’ supposedly independent decisions regarding what to cover and when.
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"The Industry that Vents Together Stays Together"
Responses to all Articles and Bo-Rants are greatly encouraged
and may be included in " BoSacks Readers Speak Out"
All news items and the various opinions expressed in this newsletter are not necessarily the opinion of, nor in agreement with the opinions of BoSacks. They are just interesting thoughts and other opinions that BoSacks thinks you should know about.
After all, as the Japanese proverb goes:
"If you believe everything you read, perhaps you better not read."
"Heard on the Web" Media Intelligence:
Courtesy of The Precision Media Group.
Print, Publishing and Media Consultants
193 Brookwood Drive, Charlottesville VA 22902
Contact - Robert M. Sacks 917-566-7437
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