Last month, I wrote:
The second method by which publishers and ad brokers will combat ad-blocking is by making ads harder to detect. We’ve already seen a huge increase in “advertorials”, ads written to look like regular editorial content. Right now, there will be tags or other markers to separate advertorial content from regular editorial content, but in the near future you can expect these borders to become ever more vague, until eventually, they’ll vanish altogether.
Today, Condé Nast, parent company of, among other things, Ars Technica, announced a new type of ad campaign, as reported by Observer.
“Creating the most compelling content and obsessively pushing boundaries is what drives Condé Nast,” chief marketing officer and president of Condé Nast Media Group Edward Menicheschi said in the announcement. “Partnering with Cadillac, a brand with similar DNA, will result in premium storytelling that engages and inspires our shared consumers.”
The marketing boundaries will be pushed by “the talented storytellers from Condé Nast’s editorial staff” who, in a variety of formats and across the company’s distribution platforms (aka editorial properties), will “dare greatly” to reimagine the relationship between editorial and advertising. Condés Cadillac campaign will consist of more than 50 pieces of custom content, including articles and video.
Give it a few years, and the boundaries between advertising and content will be gone completely. It’s the only way to combat ad blockers and deliver advertising to consumers on the web.
Oh, how we’ll long for today’s ads.
You mean like Soap Operas?
Tech “journalism” has always acted, for the most part, as a public relations tool for the industry.
A similar case can be made for almost every other branch of “journalism.”
Edited 2015-10-29 00:34 UTC
The tech press is almost opposite to the news press:
Tech press: Look at this amazing new laptop, only 3000 dollar
News press: Look at this horrible situation, the world is doomed.
I would appreciate it if the tech press would pay some attention to the equipment that the average person will use and if the news press would show the beauty and general progress of our civilizations. The closest that I can come now is “product xyz revisited after using it for 30 days / does it suck?” and sites like http://www.givesmehope.com/ and http://www.boredpanda.com/
Well, the tech press does go with the disaster approach too when there is news they can fit into that mold, which predictably means it gets exagerated, just like other news.
[quote]Oh, how we’ll long for today’s ads.[/quote]
Doubt we’ll go that far, considering how obnoxious many of today’s ads are.
Second, the article is a bit alarmist. There’s plenty of this going on already, especially with the fanboy cheerleading many tech news sites call journalism. However, once that moves into the realm of paid for ‘news’ and ‘editorializing’ that falls under an entirely different set of legal rules in most countries, including the US. Any paid for content has to be marked as such or you run the risk of the watchdog gov agencies lawyer’s come knocking. So I could say that the article is needlessly alarming about ads becoming indistinguishable from content. Indistinguishable by automated plugins? Perhaps.
However, those kinds of ads aren’t the kind that’s targeted by adblocking anyway. They’re meant to block the obnoxious, repetitive, privacy invading ad content that’s as much a threat to computer security integrity as it is to user privacy. An “aditorial” isn’t a threat to security and privacy in itself. In fact, it’s not very different from the industry standard “whitepapers” that do nothing but champion a company’s solution to some (real or imagined) problem.
As advertorials become indistinguishable from actual content, savvy readers will both go away and make their displeasure known publicly. The audience goes away, and Conde Nast finally learns the harsh lesson of GeoCities and MySpace and so many others–continued success is not guaranteed.
It’s fine. People with the ability to perform critical thinking will understand the difference between content and ad, the rest struggles anyway.
if the advertising community was responsible they would change their ways. I HATE animated ads. I will always use a ad blocker to block animated ads and ads for particular companies like Microsoft who I will never buy from. Since I won’t there is no reason for me to see their ads.
I am working with programmers who are looking into creating browsers that will sniff out ads AND articles about products or companies that we don’t want to see anything about. In this way ad blockers WILL keep up.
Put ads inside of articles so that current ad blockers can’t see and those will change with the times. It will be a continue game of leap frog that will go on until advertisers stop being slimy, which I doubt will ever happen.
Respect your readers and we will respect you and you ads. Disrespect us and we will do what we have to in order to block what offends us. If that includes not visiting any site that option, just like turning the channel on a tv, is always there.
Note that I would rather ***NOT*** have to do this. But animated ads or ads from companies I have no interest in will be blocked in any way that I have at my disposal. Change to non animated advertising and give us the choice of choosing what brands to block or never block. That is a much better answer for you as it will enable us to have a choice as to what we see and don’t see and we will be much happier and you will make more money.
I have uBlock Origin on two PC’s and AdGuard on a couple of others. Ars has recently tested non-blockable LG ads. The first one was huge and terribly annoying, taking up much of the top of the screen. The second was a pair of LG logs on the left and right borders, off from the text. When I zoomed in to not see the ads, the laft ad moved over to block the sites page and stayed there. So, there are already steps being made to shove new ad technology down out throats. Thom may be right in that we’ll long for days of the older ads as the the older ads are blockable and the new ones might not be.
Edited 2015-10-29 17:37 UTC
They can go ahead. We don’t need the websites. There will always be websites that don’t rape you.
They would be moving boldly towards an ftc investigation if they blur those lines too much;
to prevent an ad from being deceptive (which pretending to be editorial content certainly is) US websites are obliged to make a clear and conspicuous disclosure. Clear and conspicuous includes (and is not limited to) such things as well-contrasting font, font size, no need to scroll to see it, cross-platform visibility, etc.
Edited 2015-10-30 10:57 UTC