The Unethicality of Native Advertising
For most people, it makes sense to have a favorite news source.
Whether that is your local NBC or CBS channel, or maybe you appreciate reading The New York Times over The Washington Post, everyone has a place that they like going to for updates and information about our world.
What many don’t realize is that your favorite source is blending ads into your morning update right under your nose.
This is native advertising, which Laura Kloot of HubSpot describes as “the use of paid ads that fit seamlessly into the media where they appear. They blend in to match the content so that they don’t disrupt the viewer’s experience.”
On the surface, it seems like a no brainer, both advertisers win by having ads that blend into the content the viewer is ingesting, and the viewer doesn't have big annoying ads that ruin their experience on the site.
Though, the main problem with these types of ads is how they can manipulate an audience.
Lets look at Instagram. When scrolling through your feed, you’ll occasionally come across posts like this one below.
These types of ads blend seemlessly into your feed, and aim to match kinds of content that you already view, while also being inline with things you are interested in, or have bought in the past.
And for some people, its not easy to tell what is an ad and what is a normal post.
TikTok is one platform that makes it pretty hard to tell.
Ads throughout TikTok often look like they are coming from everyday creators, never feeling too produced or staged.
This causes many sponsored posts to blend into your For You page, making it so you have no idea it is an ad until you look at the bottom of the page where it says “Sponsored”.
These ads aim to take advantage of your goodwill and curiosity towards normal content. More often than not, consumers will be more skeptical of ads or sponsored content because they know the person behind the screen is getting paid.
However, when it is harder to tell when something is an ad or not, viewers will be far more likely to give the product a chance or even go out and buy it.
These companies want to be on your good side. To remove the wall of skeptical feelings towards paid media in turn for something that feels part of what you are already viewing.
I believe that this type of advertising is fairly unethical, as all these brands want to do is take advantage of you and your feelings, and especially those who might find a harder time distinguishing an ad from everything else.
People like these:
I know personally that most people unfamiliar with social media, YouTube, and more online sites, are far more likely to be susceptible to these kinds of advertisements.
But don’t just trust me, TwoOctobers.com found that people 55-64 were 0.8% more likely to click on an ad than those 18-24. While that doesn’t seem too different, if we look at it on a scale of a site such as Instagram, one of the largest social media sites today with over 2.35 billion active users, that can be a difference of hundreds of thousands to even millions of people.
We need to be able to be more ethical with our advertising and make sure that we are able to easily distinguish these types of paid media, so fewer people are tricked into giving their goodwill to a product that might not be worth it.
Kloot, L. (2021, December 21). 10 native advertising examples people actually enjoyed reading. HubSpot Blog. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/native-advertising-examples