29 November 2016

Digital Ad Shenanigans: The Academic Edition

Not too long ago:

03 October 2016
Digital Ad Shenanigans
It’s been a bad week or so for online advertising foolishness and chicanery. No big surprise for yours truly. I’ve been yacking about this nonsense for a decade.

Now there’s a book about it:

Black Ops Advertising
Native Ads, Content Marketing and the Covert World of the Digital Sell
by Mara Einstein
… Whatever the label, however, it comes down to this: advertisers can camouflage their sales message in only one of two ways 1) hide the advertising within existing content environments or 2) create the pitch themselves and make it look like something other than advertising. The first of these is native advertising, the second content marketing …

And a review in The New York Times:

… The realization that something you thought to be “real” is actually an advertisement is an increasingly common, if unsettling, sensation. Mara Einstein calls it “content confusion,” and if her book, “Black Ops Advertising,” is right, we’re in for even more such trickery, indeed a possible future where nearly everything becomes hidden commercial propaganda of one form or another. She forecasts the potential of a “world where there is no real content: Everything we experience is some form of sales pitch.”

All true. Although my take is that these silly Next Big Things will come and go.  They’ve been coming and going for years:

07 December 2012
What is Digital Advertising?
[image%255B5%255D.png]… The newest buzz-phrase has me completely baffled: Native Advertising.  One social media guru described it as advertising that is ‘baked into’ the content. I guess it’s sort of like the old Burns & Allen Show where one episode had Gracie baking a cake using Betty Crocker Cake Mix, a sponsor.

And this (again):

[image%255B22%255D.png]

 imageProfessor Mara Einstein has been working in and writing about the media industry for more than 20 years. Her career has taken her from being an executive at NBC and MTV Networks to positions at major advertising agencies, working on such accounts as Miller Lite, Uncle Ben’s, and Dole Foods.

I haven’t read the book, but will.