Native Advertising
Categories: Marketing
There we were, scrolling through our favorite newsfeed, when all of a sudden, boom, there it was: a headline telling us that we need to do these three things immediately if we want to avoid fatigue and belly fat. We definitely want to avoid those things, so we click on the link, only to find ourselves transported to a website selling vitamin supplements. “What the what?” we think to ourselves. “This isn’t a news article…”
No, it’s not. It’s what we call “native advertising,” which basically means the ad is designed to look like the page’s regular content,even though it’s not. If we pay attention, we’ll know pretty quickly that we’re seeing an ad—they usually say stuff like “suggested post” or “similar to pages you’ve interacted with in the past,” and they tend to have somewhat clickbait-esque titles—but at first glance, the ad can seem just like every other item on the page.
In all honesty, most folks aren’t fooled by native advertising. We’re not stupid. We know that link telling us to find out how these three entrepreneurs in [insert our hometown here] managed to become millionaires is not a legit news article, even if it’s in the same size box as other linked articles and the headline is in the same font. Even so, the Federal Trade Commission tends to furrow its brow when ads look like they’re trying to be misleading or overly ambiguous, which is why they’ve been paying special attention to native advertising over the past handful of years. In fact, they have very specific rules for how native ads can be created and disseminated, and for the curious, all those specificities are lined out on the agency’s website.
