Sometimes you can get a glimpse of what’s coming over the horizon and I think I got one of those this morning. I was catching up on some reading and came across a letter that the FTC sent out. It was directed to search engines but I think it’s a harbinger of things to come as the digital ad business gets more deeply into content marketing and so-called “native” advertising. You can read the letter here but in summary it says that ads in search results must be clearly identified as such:
Advertising (Photo credit: Wrote)
Search engines provide invaluable benefits to consumers. By using search engines, consumers can find relevant and useful information, typically at no charge. At the same time, consumers should be able to easily distinguish natural search results from advertising that search engines deliver. Accordingly, we encourage you to review your websites or other methods of displaying search results, including your use of specialized search, and make any necessary adjustments to ensure you clearly and prominently disclose any advertising. In addition, as your business may change in response to consumers’ search demands, the disclosure techniques you use for advertising should keep pace with innovations in how and where you deliver information to consumers.
That’s why you see the yellow background, for example, on Google search results along with it saying “ads related to (whatever the search term is)”. The point is for consumers to be able to distinguish results that someone paid to make prominent vs those that would otherwise rise to the top. Makes sense. The tail end of the letter begins to talk about this same principle as it manifests itself in social and mobile (and voice search as well!). Which got me thinking.
Content marketing done well is a beautiful thing. Hopefully you all consider this blog a good example of someone putting our content that’s informative and engaging. My hope is that this will lead you to email or call me about working with you, so I think in part that makes this an ad. If I ever write anything that I’m paid to put in here, I’ll disclose it (although I probably won’t do that in the first place). That’s content marketing – using content to sell.
Native ads are a bit more insidious. It’s about the creation of content that’s supposed to be useful and interactive like content marketing. Someone defined it as any type of advertising where the placement appeared to be appropriate except it’s much harder to identify as an ad. When an article is about cats and is really an ad for a retailer, that’s a problem.
I think it won’t be long before rules are put in place to crack down on this. How will the FTC stop fake reviews, articles such as the one above, and other forms that don’t disclose they’re really ads (which might call into question the validity of what’s in the article)? I’m not sure but I know it won’t be as thoughtful as if marketers figure it out for themselves.
What do you think?
Consult Keith 
Comments
One of the best things about digital media is that it’s an open platform.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Anyone can plug in and begin producing content or commenting on content that others have posted. Often those comments can be an interesting or insightful as the original article. They can also serve to provide balance when a “news” piece strays too far from the facts. I like reading comments most of the time and I appreciate those of you who take the time to add your thinking to mine here on the screed.
Unfortunately, there are those who use the ability to piggyback on the audiences good content attracts for other purposes. Here alone, spammers post dozens of fake comments with links back to their crap every day (WordPress has a built-in spam block that works exceptionally well). Elsewhere, trolls try to take over conversations, so the comments become a soapbox for rants against one party or politician or another no matter what the subject matter of the original story. It’s not just blog or news sites that suffer this – think about your own friends on Facebook or Twitter – seen any flame wars?
There are softwares that do moderation but they lack nuance and Im’ not sure they can fact-check a politely written bit of utter nonsense. Research has shown that an environment filled with negative comments can influence readers’ perceptions of the underlying subject matter negatively even when the piece is very neutral. What does one do? It’s not an easy answer. When we grappled with this issue many years ago as commenting became common, the solution my team went with involved, committed community members on a sort of neighborhood watch. We enabled certain folks who made insightful comments to alert us to issues and eventually even allowed some of them to block and edit to keep a safe, sane environment.
I think that’s about all we can do and still remain transparent while fostering conversation. People will have issues with your product or service and sometimes they’ll be very loud about their displeasure if it’s unwarranted. There’s not much one can do when that negativity is expressed via social shares that aren’t on your page but for the places under your control, encouraging polite, factual discourse can be a boost to readership as well as to your credibility and authenticity. That’s what I try to do here and what I try to get my clients to do as well. What do you do? Please comment (gulp!).
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