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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.
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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"
The web sites serving ads don't even know if the ads are annoying. It's all handled by a third party and he website owner fully intends to sit back passively and wait for the money to roll in. They're too busy writing their useless blog to actually pay attention. No real newspaper or television channel would ever use an advertisement that none of the staff has viewed first, yet that is the standard practice on the internet. The web site owners don't do the necessary work to decide what sorts of ads might be relevant to their viewers, they let Google figure that part out.
It's well past he absurdity stage. Youtube required me to watch part of a movie preview first before it let me see the video I wanted, even though that video was a movie preview (this actually happened). Imagine a classic rock radio station playing ads for country music because some algorithm decided that the listener appears to have an interest in music.
The whole attitude that someone "deserves" to be paid because of minimal effort spent creating the content is absurd. No one ever deserves anything, you have to work for it. If the money doesn't come in then find a new job.