Fake News Brought to You by the Ad Wizards of Corporate America

The post Fake News Brought to You by the Ad Wizards of Corporate America appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

Steve Jobs once said that “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” It was a simple message that seemingly reinforced the power of advertising. But “advertising” now comes at us in myriad ways that even Don Draper couldn’t have imagined.

In 1957, social critic Vance Packard published “The Hidden Persuaders” — a book that has become a classic. It was a peek into the emerging world of motivational research and how advertisers were, even then, trying to calculate and take advantage of our inner thoughts, fears, and dreams.

Today, with social media, virtual reality, and Internet-connected screens that are on 24/7, what Packard foresaw and Jobs helped midwife has reached new levels of intrusiveness.

Insidious tools such as native advertising, content marketing, and hidden or subversive advertising — all operating against a backdrop of fake news and intentional disinformation — make for a powerful and toxic stew of “Black Ops Advertising.” That is the focus of this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, as Jeff Schechtman talks with professor and independent marketing consultant Mara Einstein.

As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.

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As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.

Full Text Transcript:

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy, I’m Jeff Schechtman. We know that every aspect of our media landscape is changing. The newspapers are having to move online and find new ways to engage a new audience. Television is now on demand and personal. It has lost its immediacy and its mandate for news and information. The long tail of blogs and specialty news sites reinforces confirmation bias. All of this creates new problems and challenges for content providers, but also for advertisers, that have been the traditional supporters of traditional media. So what’s an advertiser to do? Of late, the answer has been new efforts like native advertising, content marketing, and sponsored advertising. But did these efforts have unintended consequences on the news content itself? We’re going to talk about this today with my guest Mara Einstein. Mara is a professor of media studies at Queens College City of New York (CUNY), as well as an independent marketing consultant. She’s been an executive at NBC and MTV, and it is my pleasure to welcome her to talk about Black Ops Advertising. Mara Einstein, thanks much for joining us here on Radio WhoWhatWhyWhy.

Mara Einstein: Oh, thanks for having me Jeff! I’m really excited to talk about that.

Jeff: Certainly as the entire media landscape has changed and in almost every regard in television, radio, newspapers, etc., particularly as it even relates to news, why should we be surprised in any way that the advertising landscape has had to change in order to keep pace with this?

Mara: Well, I mean there’s two things that’s going on. And in terms of one, that the traditional way that advertising has existed was that it was always very in-your-face, right? They had big McDonald’s yellow arches, and the Nike swoosh, and Coca-Cola signs and all of those things, but we’ve become very adept at being able to avoid all that advertising. And it began with things like the remote control on our television sets, or the DVR, and now online, everything from ad blockers to our own ability to avoid them. You know, banner blindness, we’re going to talk about it as banner blindness. The banners are there but we don’t see them. So instead of the situation where advertisers want to sort of bang us over the head with advertising, the new way of doing it is to hide the advertising so that we don’t even realize that we’re interacting with it, which makes all kinds of sense, it would have to change in the online environment, because the online environment is more one-on-one. It’s more personal, as opposed to if you were sitting down watching something during prime-time television. The advertisers would need to do something to gain your attention and get you to draw in and listen to what the commercial was. In the online space you’re more in, you know, a community sort of environment, right? That’s what Facebook is supposed to be. That’s what Twitter is supposed to be. And so within this environment where we’re not necessarily being given the ads by the advertiser, but by our friends, it becomes a softer sell. It becomes a more, more subversive sell.

Jeff: But truly nothing different than the earliest days of product placement on television, even in black and white television back in the 50s.

Mara: The difference, it definitely comes out of that for sure. What’s going on in terms of advertising now comes out of the ideas of product placement and advertorials in magazines. I think what the difference is now is twofold. One, and let me talk about the difference between native advertising and content marketing because I think people are very confused, including people in the industry are confused about what those two things are. Native advertising is advertising that is created to be indigenous to the space within which it exists. So if you’re on Facebook for example, and you see an ad that comes up and it says something like, “Your friend Susie Smith likes this company,” then that’s one form of native advertising. There may be other forms of it where it does look like an ad and it has a little ghosted button that says sponsored, or has a button where it says, “buy,” and that’s, those are native ads. And those, I think, by and large now people are more or less aware of, though some sites are more obscure about how they present those. Where it gets to be a little less obvious is two places. One, where journalists, the sites that we think of as very much journalistic sites like The New York Times, like the Wall Street Journal, like the Washington Post, present articles that look like articles but are in fact advertising. And you really have to look for the signs that say that this is advertising. And we approach that content very differently knowing that, thinking that it’s journalism or editorial, rather than thinking that it’s advertising. If I read an article, what I think is an article, which is in fact something that has been paid for by an advertiser, by Goldman Sachs, or Shell Oil, and it’s a story about sustainability, I’m going to think about that particular article very differently than I would if I knew that a reporter from The New York Times had written it separate and apart from sponsorship behind it. So that’s native advertising.

The other side of the coin is content marketing. 

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