The Huffington Post giving its readers an advertising fake out
June 26, 2009 by William K. Wolfrum
Over the last year, I’ve worked on several stories involving Internet hoaxes, including the Martin Eisenstadt hoax and the Ben & Jerry’s “CyClone Dairy” hoax. On a couple of these stories, I’ve had the pleasure of working with journalist Diane Tucker of The Huffington Post. Tucker, who takes journalism quite seriously, has given Huffpo readers the inside scoop on some of these stories.
Of course, these days, Tucker may need to look at The Huffington Post itself, as the prominent liberal news site has taken to giving its readers a fake out of its own. According to Wired, Huffpo – as well as Salon – has taken to running “advertorials.” The only thing about these advertorials – which are generally plainly marked as advertisements in newspapers and magazines – is that they take the form of real stories from real news sites.
From Wired:
That “News5Alert” ran in a rotating ad spot on HuffPost last week, though it was not identified as an ad. Clicking on it took you to a story from “News 5″ in Sacramento — which is not a TV station — revealing how one Mary Steadman now makes $6,500 a month working from home, thanks to an internet course called Google Home Income.
The story has art, it has a sidebar, there’s weather, supposed reader comments — even ads. Steadman is described as “a mother from San Francisco” — at least, when I read the article. Thanks to cutting-edge reporting techniques perfected by News 5, she will automatically move to the geolocation of your internet IP address when you read it. Look, she lives right in your neighborhood!
Salon displayed a similar ad yesterday, showing a newspaper clipping with the headline, “Can You Really Work Online at Home? We Investigate This Trend.”
Read the whole story from Wired and decide for yourself whether or not Huffpo has crossed a line between news and hucksterism. Personally, I go with the latter. Because while making money in the news biz is no easy feat, tricking readers out of their hard-earned money is the stuff of low-brow tabloids, not for the biggest news web site on the planet.
–WKW
I’m fairly cynical about advertising, and I’m always on the lookout for someone trying to fool me. Recently, I was briefly tricked by Golf Week. The cover of Golf Week a couple of weeks ago was about a golf resort. Except it wasn’t. The cover was fake and if you looked closely it said “advertisement” in small letters. Under the fake cover was the real cover with Tiger Woods swinging away like Tiger should.
So I can see how making an ad look like something real has serious value for advertisers; people pay attention to it. But such trickery backfires as people become more cynical and sophisticated and harder to sell to. Not to mention that it makes the website or newspaper or TV station less credible in the eyes of their readers/viewers.
IMO, there are three areas with news agencies that should have strong and clearly discernible dividing lines: news, opinion, and advertisement.
I was going to end my little bitchy reply with a joke about my Amish fireplace, but with temps hitting the high 90′s of late, I’m finding it hard to work in.
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/images02/amish_heater.jpg