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Explainer: Native advertising
Intermediate
Press releases, Information Neighbourhoods
In print newspapers and magazines, we have what we call advertorials. They look and read like news articles but in fact, they are sponsored content.
In other words, someone paid to put the story into the newspaper, just like an advertisement, but it is presented in the form of an article.
The one on the screen is a scanned image of one such advertorial published in the South China Morning Post, an English-language newspaper in Hong Kong.
And here’s the media company’s rate card which shows how much you need to pay to place an advertorial.
When you Google “advertorial examples,” you can easily find many examples of this practice.
If you look closer, the advertorials are often given labels like a “special report” and a “sponsored feature” but if you don’t pay attention, you can easily miss that disclosure.
On the web, similar articles and videos are sometimes called native advertising.
The idea is the same. Some sponsored information is placed and shown as part of the news website content even though they are there because someone paid for it.
The following video from the Coursera course Making Sense of the News explains how native ads can be problematic:
It should be noted that they are different from the press releases.
Press releases have their own problems, as we have discussed earlier, but they are given to the news media with little strings attached.
Journalists are essentially free to decide what to do with them. But advertorials and native ads are paid content and they don’t go through the kind of editorial process that normal news stories go through. They are advertisements disguised as editorial content.
What the concept of information neighbourhoods and the blurred lines among each neighbourhood tells us is that when we get news, we must ask ourselves which neighbourhood the story belongs to. It is not an easy task because the boundaries are not clear cut.
Nonetheless, this is an important first step to be critical towards the information because we are now questioning the motives and methodologies behind the news stories.
