AD International / Ethics And Accountability

Native advertising and the duty to look like what you are

The obligation is simple to state and is exactly what makes the format commercially attractive.

Advertising that resembles editorial content, entertainment or personal recommendation is not new, but its share of the whole has grown, and it presents a problem the older formats did not. A poster announces itself. A page of paid content shaped like an article does not, and the value of the format to whoever bought it derives substantially from that fact. This is the uncomfortable centre of the issue: the confusion is not an unfortunate side effect to be managed, it is frequently the thing being purchased, which is why the disclosure discussion never quite settles.

The obligation is easy to state. Advertising should be recognisable as advertising to an ordinary person paying ordinary attention, which is to say not much attention at all. Disclosure that satisfies a technical requirement while being reliably missed does not meet that standard, and everyone involved in producing it knows whether it does. The applicable codes and regulators in each jurisdiction set out the specific requirements. The professional test is simpler and harsher: would a distracted reader know, without looking for it, that someone paid for this?

There is a self interested argument alongside the ethical one, and it deserves airing because it tends to be more persuasive internally. The value of a format that borrows the credibility of something else lasts exactly as long as the credibility does. Every piece that fools someone spends a little of the trust that made the format work, and the depletion is collective rather than individual. An industry that has repeatedly exhausted formats this way might be expected to recognise the pattern by now.