John Oliver and Native Advertising

Comedian John Oliver on his show Last Week Tonight recently questioned companies’ means of using native advertising. He argued that “…the trendy marketing practice is a threat to the editorial independence of newsrooms, tends to mislead readers, erodes trust, and is a disturbing symptom of the broader financial problems hampering print news organizations as they adapt to the Web” (Gillette, 2014, para. 1).  

Link to video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc

Oliver notes that many companies have gone into the native advertising game because it is very “lucrative” (“Last Week Tonight,” 2014). For Buzzfeed, 100% of their revenue comes from branded content (“Last Week Tonight,” 2014). Some companies say that native advertising is fine as long as it is clearly marked, but what Oliver points out is it is often not clearly marked and consumers cannot determine what is native advertising and what is actually news (“Last Week Tonight,” 2014).  

Link to picture:

http://paidpost.nytimes.com/netflix/women-inmates-separate-but-not-equal.html

Oliver gave the example of a New York Times article titled “Women Inmates: Why the Male Model Doesn’t Work”, which looked like a real article but was in fact a paid post for the Netflix show Orange Is the New Black (“Last Week Tonight,” 2014). Oliver compared this article to Katy Perry’s song “Roar” saying, “It’s like hearing the one Katy Perry song that you like. You think, sure, this is the best possible iteration of Katy Perry, but it still feels wrong to be listening to this” (“Last Week Tonight,” 2014). The problem, Oliver says, is that companies are not going to be as clear with their native advertising as the New York Times, so it could erode the trust with consumers who are unable to distinguish between real news and paid advertisements (“Last Week Tonight,” 2014).

Personally, I don’t feel native advertising should exist. I cannot tell when an ad is real or if it is an actual story and I don’t want to be played, in a sense, by the company into believing something is real when it is not. I don’t think there is a way to make native advertising less deceptive. The only way would be to mark the ad very distinctly that it is an advertisement, however, I still feel that companies would try to deceive.  

Gillette, Felix. (2014, Aug. 5). Native-Ad Experts Critique John Oliver’s Harsh Critique of Native Advertising. Bloomberg Businessweek. Retrieved from http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-08-05/ad-industry-execs-weigh-in-on-john-olivers-native-advertising-takedown

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. (2014, Aug. 3). Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Native Advertising (HBO). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc