From Slate
A Surprising Reason Why You Might Not Realize “Sponsored Content” Is Actually Advertising
By Jacob Brogan
Is there any Internet-age euphemism more telling than “sponsored content”? Publications have been running these sly advertisements—once known as advertorials—since at least the mid-20th century, always labeling them to differentiate them from editorial material. (Slate is one of them.) You’d think that we would have learned to recognize them by now, but a new study indicates that a “significant minority of consumers” may still be in the dark. Ultimately, however, that study doesn’t prove how stupid readers are so much as it demonstrates the elaborate efforts advertisers put into making us trust them.
The study’s authors, University of California, Berkeley, Internet law professor Chris Jay Hoofnagle [an adjunct professor in the School of Information] and lawyer Eduard Meleshinsky, observe that most investigations of paid content devolve into handwringing over its meaning for journalism more generally. Taking a different tack, their work considers these messages from the perspective of consumer perception, asking whether readers could differentiate sponsored content from other materials in a publication. To this end, they confronted 598 survey respondents with a mock blog containing three articles. While two were apparently unobtrusive and inoffensive (the study offers no description of their content), the third was “a realistic advertorial” for what appears to be amphetamines. Though they labeled it as a “sponsored report,” they didn’t specify an author or otherwise indicate its origins....