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FTC Issues New Rules for Native Advertising on the Internet (blockadblock.com)
popo writes: Native Advertising, or advertorial content that's camouflaged to mimic a site's original content is all the rage among web publishers these days particularly as ad-blocking takes a bigger and bigger bite out of traditional web-advertising revenues. Well the FTC reiterated its position on native ads and may have just slammed the door shut on this "alternative" form of online advertising. The verdict: If it's not clearly marked "advertising", it may be considered misleading. And by misleading, the FTC means illegal. Of course, from an adblocking perspective, once you clearly indicate something is an ad — you make it all the more easy to block. Which defeats one of the primary goals of native ads to begin with.
I guess this won't bar product placement though. What distinguishes between "placement" and "native ads" anyway? Placement has gotten pretty ridiculous in some media. You know, I used to enjoy the Tonight Show monologue, right up through Leno. Come to think of it, even Leno did placements with his "products that shouldn't merge" routine; but at least it was funny. Sort of. Now I play a game with the Tonight Show and some of the other late night shows. When the first product placement appears, I turn the TV off and go to bed. Very often I fail to make it through the entire monologue.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I work in the advertising industry. Despite all the buzz around them and the dumb marketing nonsense, "native" ads had abysmal click-through rate, engagement, and literally negative brand metric. Turns out, users really really dislike being tricked into thinking an ad is actual page content, and brands are starting to get results back that show this. High end clients have specifically eliminated native advertisement from their purchased inventory.
The rules still need to be in place for the crap-tier networks, but chances are those are going to be based in eastern europe anyway and thus not subject to FTC rules at all.
I personally, consciously support advertising because I recognize the the value from both the perspective of the advertiser and the website. However I still use adblock because the way these ads work is just downright annoying, but, I leave the acceptable ads option turned on to enable the ones that aren't.
Consider the perspective of the sponsor: When you have a new product you're trying to sell, you need a way to communicate with your customer that it is in fact available for them to buy. Take something you obviously use for example: A personal computer. Now, while you yourself might be well informed about the market and build your own, the vast majority of any given business's potential customers aren't. Advertising is how you reach them.
And then of course, the perspective of the website: They pay actual people actual money to write their content. That money doesn't come in when people don't pay to view it, but it DOES have to come from somewhere. Thus, advertising works suitably.
If some websites are getting tired of adblock, then instead of using anti-adblock scripts (which people create filters to work around these all the time, see the adblock forum) they might try doing the sensible thing and stop using assfucking annoying ads. Either that or if the acceptable ads don't pay enough, then show the regular annoying ads to people who don't use adblock and show acceptable ads to adblock users. Either that or they get nothing at all from adblock users who will either simply opt for a competitor site that has similar content or just find a way to circumvent their anti-adblock script.
Even Google, who is in many respects the king of internet advertising and likely gains the most from it, is trying to get the ad industry to stop with these crap tactics.
The site I work on uses native advertising (as well as more conventional ads). We prefer the native ads not because we're trying to fool blockers (or indeed users) - the ads are still clearly labelled as such. The reason we prefer them is they perform hugely better. When the ad content fits with the overall content of the site and is actually tailored to the audience it turns out people engage with it - and that makes the advertisers happy and makes us more money.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"