Doing Sponsored Content Badly: 'Native Advertising' Isn't Native If It Sucks

from the not-how-to-do-it dept

There's been an uproar about The Atlantic's decision yesterday to run sponsored content from Scientology, which consisted of a pretty poorly done advertorial about Scientology's "successes" in the past year. The comments on the piece included a bunch of "wow this is just awesome!" type comments that suggest both moderation and pre-planned comments from supporters. After widespread outcry about The Atlantic going in such a direction, the piece was pulled. Recently, there's also been similar (though slightly different) "sponsored" posts on Buzzfeed, in which staff plaster some company's name over a "top 10" or "top 15" list that they slap together -- often by pulling images from other sources (Reddit is a popular one), without making much effort to credit whoever came up with the content. There's even been a fair bit of controversy over the Associated Press' recent decision to allow sponsored tweets from Samsung during CES.

All of these seem like examples of doing "sponsored content" badly -- just as more and more publications are getting into sponsored content. While it's good to see publications taking some risks and trying something new, the downside is that it has the potential to completely scare off companies from doing any forms of sponsored content, even when it can be done much better. For many, many years, we've talked about how how content is advertising and advertising is content, and those who get it right are going to go far. The problem is that it's tough to get right -- often because the marketers themselves are so focused on old school "advertising" in which they have to keep pushing their message and their message alone, they miss out on the fact that this backfires in a big bad way every single time.

There's been a lot of talk lately about "native advertising" -- which is the buzzphrase around this kind of content these days. Many point out that "advertorial" is nothing new, and that's accurate, but true native content is something different. For years, when we've talked about these concepts, everyone has complained about said "advertorial", suggesting that it's annoying or misleading -- and that's been the problem with the examples above. But, when done right, it doesn't need to be either annoying or misleading. And we need to get to that point. Five years ago we put forth some basic concepts for why the world needed to move towards this model, and I still think they hold true today:

1. The captive audience is dead. There is no captive audience online. Everyone surfing the web has billions of choices on what they can be viewing, and they don't want to be viewing intrusive and annoying ads. They'll either ignore them, block them or go elsewhere.
2. Advertising is content. You can't think of ads as separate things any more. Without a captive audience, there's no such thing as "advertising" any more. It's just content. And it needs to be good/interesting/relevant content if you want to get anyone to pay attention to it.
3. Content is advertising. Might sound like a repeat of the point above, and in some ways it is -- but it's highlighting the flip side. Any content is advertising. It's advertising something. Techdirt content "advertises" our business even if you don't realize it. Every bit of content advertises something, whether on purpose or not.
4. Content needs to be useful/engaging/interesting. This simply ties all of that together. If you want anyone to pay attention to your content (which is advertising something, whether on purpose or not) it needs to be compelling and engaging.

The problem is that many marketers (and many publications) seem to really miss out on that last point. The content -- whether it's advertising, native content, advertorial or whatever -- needs to be useful/engaging/interesting. The Scientology advertorial and the AP sponsored tweets really fell down on that point. The Buzzfeed content at least got much of that aspect correct, but fell down on the kinds of things that often piss people off: poorly attributed copied content. There's no reason why Buzzfeed couldn't have done such a collection with proper attribution and most of the controversy would have been avoided.

And that's the real point here: it is possible to do "sponsored content" in a compelling way. I still like to point to the example that we did a few years back with UPS sponsoring us to do some videos about the topics we already talk about, leading to things like the following video about the economics of abundance: When we posted that we were actually surprised (but thrilled) to find out that many in our community were happy to see projects like that move forward. That was because it was about creating useful and engaging content that wasn't misleading or just pure propaganda.

The world will get there eventually, but it's an ongoing struggle to get both publications and marketers to realize that "native advertising" isn't native if the content sucks and no one wants to see it (especially if it's pure propaganda, or otherwise enrages people). Some continue to insist that any and all such sponsored content is, by definition, problematic, but I don't think it needs to be. It's just that we need to get people in marketing firms and at publications to move past such a view of native advertising. The Atlantic should have known ahead of time how people would react. Buzzfeed should have made sure its content didn't set off a firestorm. And the companies paying for such ads should also learn that if they're just creating annoying content, it's not helping anyone, least of all themselves.

Filed Under: advertising is content, buzzfeed, content is advertising, native advertising, scientology, sponsored content, the atlantic
Companies: ap, buzzfeed, the atlantic

The Atlantic Learns To Out-Innovate Itself

from the key-lessons dept

Last year, in doing my two minute video presentation on the innovator's dilemma, my final point in the video was that "out-innovating yourself, always beats being out-innovated by someone else." This isn't an original idea, certainly, but what always amazes me is how few companies actually understand it. They get so hung up on keeping their existing product in place, that they fail to recognize that the market is changing around them. They're so afraid of cannibalizing their own business that they don't realize that others are cannibalizing it for them. It's a key theme throughout many of the posts here, as businesses seek to prevent others from cannibalizing their own business, without realizing they need to do it to themselves or go out of business. Even in cases where companies claim they recognize this, actually implementing a self-cannibalization strategy is quite difficult. It often gets killed by internal politics from legacy players (the Time Warner/AOL merger was a huge case study in this phenomenon).

That's why it's always great to find the rare examples of an organization that seem to not just recognize this need to out-innovate yourself, but to also successfully implement a strategy for doing so. FolioMag has a short story about how the magazine, The Atlantic totally reinvented itself and did so successfully. Atlantic Media's President even made the point directly:

"If our mission was to kill the magazine, what would we do?" said Smith, who added that a digital competitor was going to do that anyway, so they did it themselves.

Read that again. There are so few companies that realize this needs to be a key element of their strategy. Someone else is out there trying to kill them. So do it yourself and reap the rewards. In the case of The Atlantic, it appears that the strategy they took was twofold: first, they realized they needed to be a "digital first" operation. That is, they recognized that digital wasn't just an adjunct to the print product, but a core element of the brand and the publication. So, they didn't look for ways to enhance the print product with some digital trickery -- but instead, looked for ways to make the digital product be fantastic on its own. And, now, nearly 40% of the brand's revenue comes from its online properties, at a time when many other publications that come from the print world are still struggling to get online revenues out of the single digits.

On top of that, it looks like Atlantic Media really did search for additional scarce reasons to buy that applied to the media field. The Atlantic realized that events (scarcity: access) were a big idea that many consumer publications ignored:

Smith has also built up the company's live event platform, and noted this is an area where consumer publishers often fall flat. "Consumer publishers don't view events as a profit center," he said. Accordingly, live event revenues have doubled over the last two years.

It's always great to see a company making smart strategic decisions, even if it conflicts with a legacy line of business.

This will also likely be one of the topics we touch on tomorrow night at the Techdirt Saves* Journalism event. If you haven't signed up yet, you're missing out. The signed-up attendees represent a fantastic and diverse mix of thinkers and doers from a variety of different fields (well beyond just journalism -- though, there are plenty of traditional "journalism" folks coming too). As I've been preparing for the event, talking to the other speakers and some of the attendees, it's getting more and more exciting. Getting lots of smart people together to brainstorm is always so much fun. Hopefully, you can make it.

Filed Under: competition, innovation, journalism, the atlantic
Companies: atlantic media