Dan Greenburgh, Founder and CEO of Sharethrough, defines native ads as “a type of paid media that fits the form and function of the user experience on the site or app in which they’re placed. In short, they’r ads that fit in”. Native advertisements can be seen everywhere, from any publishing site to any social media as well. As an advertisement that fits seamlessly into the user experience, they’re more contextual than other forms of digital advertising (e.g. display and banner ads). Instead of appearing off to the side or across the top of a web page, native ads mimic the look, feel, and function of a medium’s content, making it more likely that the audience will trust them (Lessard, 2018).
Native Advertising: Ethical or Unethical?
With the rapid growth of native advertising, there has been an increased interest to enhance the understanding of consumers’ responses to online native ads. Brands and advertisers love native ads, mainly because the click-through rates tend to be much higher than typical advertisements and engagement is usually much stronger. The primary purpose, techniques and intention of this style of native advertising is deception. It seeks to masquerade itself as unbiased “content” while promoting a decidedly one-sided and often misleading perception of the products attributes or value. The common defense that is parroted throughout the industry is that native advertising “should” always be clearly recognized as advertising by the public. Of course! That’s why we go to such great lengths to cover it, as anything but advertising, so consumer will recognize it. If you believe that, you also probably believe that McDonald’s and Cereal manufacturers do target children with their advertising (native or otherwise). This is precisely how this technique of persuasion is designed to work. It is well known in the advertising industry that if you can bypass a person’s rational decision-making process (that thing that kick’s in when you KNOW someone is trying to sell you something) it is much easier to persuade and and sway an individual’s thinking, perception and preferences about something (ie a product/service) The first step is always to deceive the target into thinking that they are not being sold anything at all, but being provided “entertainment” or unbiased “content”. Nothing could be further from the truth, which is why advertisers try so hard to hide what they are doing. Call “native” advertising what it is: propaganda masquerading as information or entertainment (J.Rose, 2014).
Unethical illustration of native advertising:
The content for this ad is utterly objectionable and completely offensive. This “content” was originally created to promote the TBS reality TV show “King of the Nerds.” Aside from the tiny “Sponsored” tag toward the top of the post (highlighted above), there is nothing to distinguish this ad from the type of drivel Gawker usually publishes. After the promo was over, the editorial staff at Gawker couldn’t even be bothered to restructure the article to remain grammatically correct, and instead just deleted the name of the show.
Native advertising could not be considered purely unethical, it depends upon the brand or organization whose doing the native advertisements. the content of native ads should not be harming the consumers emotions by any mean. Content should be unbiased, not racist and affecting any human’s emotion by sex, colour and religion. Native ads can be interesting, informative and to sell a product or advertise about a brand, but it should not be wrong, if the consumers or readers take it in a wrong manner, the consumers will then hate the brand, Brand or organizations should know intellectually, how to promote any product or service through native advertisement however, Native advertising can be an effective way to advertise in the long run, it can be ethical to advertise because most of the people are actively online on social media etc.
References:
Anon 2018. What Is Native Advertising? The 6 Universal Types & How To Use Them [Online] Available at: https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/blog/linkedin-b2b-marketing/2018/What-Is-Native-Advertising [Accessed: 22 May 2019].
rose, john 2014. Is native advertising ethical? [Online].
Anon 2018. Native Advertising Examples: 5 of the Best (and Worst) [Online] Available at: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/07/07/native-advertising-examples [Accessed: 22 May 2019].
raghav 