By Alison Gold
Turn on the TV, scroll on social media, or drive down the highway, and you’re bound to encounter blatant advertisements. It’s usually easy to spot an ad by its jingle, corporate logo, or tagline, but some commercial content is far less conspicuous.
With the help of a sneaky practice called native advertising, corporations can now pay major media companies to create and post news articles that look like journalistic content from the outlet’s own newsroom. Many media companies even have entire in-house content studios dedicated to producing this stealthy commercial content. The result? Sometimes, millions of dollars in ad revenue for media outlets — and an abundance of misled readers. In one study, only about 9% of participants could identify these native ads as advertisements.
“Time after time, the vast majority of people in our experiments, when we exposed them to these native ads with these disclosures, they think it’s news that they’re looking at,” said Michelle Amazeen, an associate professor at Boston University’s College of Communication (COM) and a core faculty member at BU’s Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS).
Amazeen details the unique harms of native advertising for consumers, journalists, and society more broadly in her new book, Content Confusion: News Media, Native Advertising, and Policy in an Era of Disinformation.
“My aim with this book is to make the role of news organizations in creating and perpetuating this type of disinformation more widely known while also encouraging journalists and publishers to confront what this practice is doing to their industry,” she writes in the book’s opening pages.
On December 4, IGS hosted Amazeen to discuss her recently published book with moderator Jill Abramson, a distinguished professor of practice and senior fellow at The Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University. Abramson spent 17 years in senior editorial roles at The New York Times, where she spoke against the rollout of native ads.
“The digital world really changed what used to be a very tall, strong wall between news and ads,” Abramson said at the event.
“My aim with this book is to make the role of news organizations in creating and perpetuating this type of disinformation more widely known while also encouraging journalists and publishers to confront what this practice is doing to their industry.”
– Michelle Amazeen in Content Confusion
Confusing Readers and ‘Demoralizing’ Reporters
In one prominent example from Amazeen’s book, beginning in 2018, The New York Times ran a native ad for ExxonMobil touting the company’s sustainability efforts. According to Amazeen’s research, many participants exposed to the ad did not notice or understand the significance of the banner at the top of the article that read “PAID POST.”
ExxonMobil paid The New York Times $5 million for the project, Amazeen said. The state of Massachusetts later cited the ad as evidence of ExxonMobil’s “false and misleading” communications.
“For ExxonMobil and the fossil fuel industry, their motivation is to borrow the halo of credibility that these news outlets lend,” Amazeen said.
As large oil and gas companies aim to sway public opinion regarding their role in the climate crisis, native ads are a persuasive tool.
“Advertisers are buying the prestige of the publications where they’re placing these native ads…” Abramson said. “The danger for the news companies is that these could tarnish their brand, which would be, in a way, the ultimate irony, right?”
Amazeen’s research supports Abramson’s concern, revealing that people exposed to native advertising from a given outlet were less likely to trust unsponsored reporting from that outlet later on.
Further confusing readers, the content of native ads sometimes “contradicts what’s coming out of the newsroom” at that same outlet, Amazeen said.
“I talk about in the book how this practice is demoralizing to many journalists,” she said. “I have some interviews with journalists who see what’s happening. Some of them are afraid to report on advertisers because they don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them. They don’t want to uncover anything that might jeopardize the relationship.”
Indeed, an analysis by Amazeen and her colleague showed that media outlets are often less likely to report on corporations that pay them to run native ads.
Experts Call for Consistent Labels, More Media Literacy Training, and Higher Standards
At the event, Amazeen and Abramson discussed several solutions that newsrooms or lawmakers could implement to reduce content confusion.
One is clearer labels. Currently, native ads may be marked as a “paid post,” “sponsored content,” “partner content,” or another term. Requiring all advertisements to be clearly labeled as “advertisement” would eliminate ambiguity and help readers understand what they’re seeing. Additionally, these disclosure labels often disappear entirely when ads are posted on social media; ensuring they stick when shared is also critical.
Amazeen suggested that newsrooms might consider reserving native ads exclusively for entertainment-related topics, rather than news, or refusing to accept ads from certain industries proven to be damaging to the environment or human health. She acknowledged that by reducing native advertising, media companies risk losing revenue. Amazeen pointed to The New York Times as a company that has successfully boosted income by expanding its offerings into games and cooking.
“Their business model relies on reader revenue,” Amazeen said. “That’s why they’ve added all these products, because not only news junkies may become digital subscribers, but gamers, or cooks, so that’s been a very successful strategy.”
Educating consumers about native ads also prevents persuasion. Noting that a foundational principle of media literacy training is evaluating sources, Amazeen said, “We do need more media literacy training” from public and academic institutions.
At the talk’s conclusion, Amazeen answered questions from audience members and signed books. The event opened with remarks from IGS Executive Director Rebecca Pearl-Martinez and misinformation scholar Arunima Krishna, an associate professor at COM, associate director at IGS, and one of Amazeen’s research collaborators. This event was hosted by IGS and co-sponsored by COM, BU School of Law, and the Ravi K. Mehrotra Institute for Business, Markets, and Society.
Amazeen served as a co-investigator on the BU Climate Disinformation Initiative, an interdisciplinary research effort to understand the nature, origins, spread, and impacts of climate change mis- and disinformation, jointly funded by IGS and the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering. The team continues to generate and publish new insights, with recent articles in The International Journal of Press/Politics and npj Climate Action.