Tricking People With Fake Content Isn't Good Advertising

from the that's-sleazy dept

One of the things that gets people upset when we talk about advertising being content, and content being advertising is that they think this means advertisers tricking users into viewing their ads. That's not true at all. It should be totally upfront. People who pass along a cool commercial are doing it because they know exactly what it's advertising and they know that it's still cool. The idea is to create content that's so good that even though everyone knows it's advertising, they don't mind. If you have to "trick" people into viewing your ad, then it's bad content.

Witness, for example, this story from Wired, about a company advertising a "work from home" scheme. To advertise it, they built a series of fake news sites that look incredibly realistic -- just look at this example from a site called News5Alert or The Miami Gazette News, that look an awful lot like real news sites. As Karl notes, they even show that the "comments are closed due to spam."

But the whole thing is fake. It's really an ad. And, to make it worse, the company behind it is taking out ads on real news sites and trying to make it look like news -- thereby tricking people into reading their ad. The whole scam is to get people to sign up for info on how to make money from home -- for which they're charged $2... but then suddenly many claim they started finding additional "surprise" charges on their credit card, which the company says they actually agreed to in the fine print. That's an old scam, but using real-looking news articles is the new twist. So, while content is advertising, misleading or sneaky advertising is bad content.

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Making Banner Ads Cool Again

from the is-it-possible? dept

We talk a lot about the idea that advertising is content and content is advertising, and there are always those who get confused and insist that they hate advertising... and that if they see content as advertising they won't pay attention. But explain that to the millions of folks who tune into the Super Bowl each year to watch the commercials rather than the game. If the content is good, no one cares that it's also advertising. Of course, usually when we talk about this sort of thing, we're talking about content/advertising that goes outside the usual boundaries of advertising -- since the traditional forms of advertising have been so overdone and are so painful that people instinctively ignore them.

But could the banner ad, for example, be rescued? I still remember, way back in the early days of banner ads, actually paying quite a bit of attention to an HP banner ad for the Mopier. In fact, I remember the ad so much, I still remember the name of the product it was advertising. That's because the ad itself was fun. It was a game of Pong within the ad itself, with the paddles controlled via mouseovers. That was advertising that worked... But, for the most part these days, banner ads are either boring or intrusive. Yet, sometimes, people still do creative things. Mike (different one, obviously) pointed me to an award-winning banner ad from Pringles, which is quite silly, but fun to click, because it tells a story (and does so amusingly) and you want to find out how it ends. I don't know if the initial call to action is enough to get people to dive in, but if advertisers actually put more thought into making their ads interesting and fun, perhaps people wouldn't just ignore them all the time.

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Content Is Advertising; Advertising Is Content... On SNL

from the blurring-boundaries dept

If you're in any business that relies on "advertising" for revenue, you need to stop thinking of it as advertising -- and start realizing that advertising and content are the same thing. All traditional "advertising" is content -- and if you want anyone to pay attention to it, it had better be good content. At the same time, all traditional "content" is advertising -- it's just a question of what it's advertising. But as more companies recognize this, we're going to see an increasingly blurry line between advertising and content. While some purists decry this situation, they shouldn't worry so much. It will improve both the overall quality of the "content" that you see all the time in two ways: it will allow for better financing of that content and it makes sure that the formerly "bad" advertising content isn't sustainable and goes away.

Reader James Thomas sends in an example of this blurring of the lines that occurred recently with Saturday Night Live. Apparently, on the SNL the night before the Superbowl, there were three skits "MacGruber" skits (a parody of the popular classic TV show MacGyver) each of which had a totally over-the-top promotion of Pepsi. That part may seem like traditional product placement (though, oddly over the top), but the interesting part was that the next night, during the Superbowl, NBC actually showed one of those sketches during a commercial break. In other words, the sketch itself was then repurposed as "commercial" content -- thus blurring the lines completely. I'm not sure how effective this was (personally, I don't find the MacGruber skits funny at all), but it does demonstrate some of how things are changing. If you did the same thing with content that actually was enjoyable, I could see it getting a much better reaction.

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Who Says Content And Advertising Can't Mix?

from the yet-another-example dept

We've been talking about the fact that content is advertising and advertising is content for a while now, and one of our regular readers, Bill, sent in a neat example of this at work. It's the latest video from the Eepy Bird guys (if you're reading this in a feed reader, you may need to click through to see this):

The Eepy Bird guys are, of course, most famous for their Diet Coke + Mentos video which kicked off quite the international phenomenon. One of the less-well-documented aspects was what happened after the video became popular. For a while, neither Coca-Cola nor Mentos was particularly thrilled with the idea of associating themselves with the video. Coca-Cola specifically distanced itself from the phenomenon initially. Mentos took some time, but quickly embraced the phenomenon, agreeing to sponsor future Eepy Bird projects. And, with a little pushing, Coca Cola also came around.

So, now we've got this new video, and it's definitely entertaining. Using hundreds of thousands of Post-It Notes forming paper "slinkies," the video demonstrates that recognition of how advertising and content are becoming one. The video is certainly entertaining and fun to watch -- so it's likely to attract many viewers. However, there's also plenty of advertising built into it as well. First, most obviously, it continues to build up Eepy Bird's reputation for quirky fun video "experiments." But, the video also "debuted" on television on the ABC Family channel as a part of that station's TV show Samurai Girl. So, it was also an advertisement for that show as well as the ABC Family network. On top of that, the video was sponsored by Office Max (who sells Post-It Notes, obviously), but not in a particularly intrusive or annoying manner. And, while it was not overtly sponsored by 3M, you have to imagine that the maker of Post-Its can't be particularly disappointed by the additional publicity. And, oh yeah, the best part is that video also contains a note at the end (not sure if it's an "ad" per se) from... Coca Cola, the very company that had been so hesitant to embrace Eepy Bird.

So, here we have a very entertaining video that doesn't "trick" anyone, isn't intrusive and still helps "advertise" a whole variety of different things without being annoying about it.

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Newspaper Content Is Advertising For More News Content

from the follow-this-through dept

I haven't had much time lately to add any new posts to my series of posts on how content is advertising, but a great post from Steve Yelvington is a perfect example of how this works in the news business. Yelvington refers to a blog post by Jay Rosen where he explains how listening to the radio show This American Life explaining the credit crunch (titled "The Giant Pool of Money" -- which, indeed is an excellent explanation) brought him up to speed on the story, and made him hunger for more news on that topic:

I noticed something in the weeks after I first listened to "The Giant Pool of Money." I became a customer for ongoing news about the mortgage mess and the credit crisis that developed from it. Previously I had skipped over such reports because I just didn't understand the story. Now I did. 'Twas was a successful act of explanation that put me in the market for information. Before that moment I had ignored hundreds of news reports about Americans losing their homes, the housing market crashing, banks in trouble.

In other words, the good content that made up the radio program advertised other news stories about that topic. At the same time, it helped advertise This American Life as a good source of information, and will certainly make Jay Rosen go back to that program in the future if they run similar "explain this big confusing mess" type programs. So, if you were a news organization, perhaps in the financial space, that wanted more and more people looking at your coverage of the credit crisis, wouldn't it make sense to help finance a popular radio program to do such a "layman's explanation" knowing that you'd make up the money in greater readership (and greater ad volume)? Once again, we see how good content is advertising -- though not in the way that people traditionally think of it.

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Other posts in this series:

• Advertising Is Content; Content Is Advertising
• On Content, Promotions, Basic Economics... And Loutish Statements
• Content Is Advertising... In The Newspaper Industry
• Content Is Advertising... On TV
• Newspaper Content Is Advertising For More News Content

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