Category: badvertising

No One Must Know This Is A Sponsored Post

Media Discovery (New Web Ltd) is encouraging blogs to run paid for advertorials, without disclosing to their readership that the content is an advert. This appears to be in breach of the advertising industry's code of practice.

Anyone who has ever run a blog is probably familiar with these sorts of email - I get one or two a week.

Hi Terence,

I recently sent you an email about hosting an advertisement on your site. I hope you received it, if not it may have ended up in your junk folder.

I believe we offer a very attractive system of advertising. You would be paid a yearly-renewable fee for placing a text-based advertisement that is appropriate to the topic of your site.

Please get back to me if you are interested in placing an advertisement on Shkspr.mobi?

Kind Regards,

Jesse Morgan
[email protected]

I rarely reply to such spam, however, having heard of Media Discovery's shady practices in the past, I thought I'd respond and find out more.

This is what I got back:

After reviewing your website, we think that a new blog post would be the best and least intrusive option for you. We have two ways of doing this:

A) You are free to come up with the content of the article or blog post, but we do ask that it is in some way relevant to our client and is composed of roughly 300 words.

B) I can ask our copywriters to craft an article to fit your site.

To see an example, kindly visit: http://www.mycarreviews.co.uk/citroen-c4-review/. The advert can be found within the third paragraph - 'J.D. Power'.

We’ll pay you an annual upfront payment and we will endeavour to make sure that you are paid within two working days, using PayPal or Moneybookers. Working with a telecommunications, beauty, health, tourism or finance client would ensure you would get 130 EUR per year, while working with an online gaming client (poker, casino, bingo etc) would ensure you would get 140 EUR per year.

Please let me know if you're interested, so I can have your site assessed by our Technical Team. I can then send the advert details and client information.

Alternatively, if you have any more questions about this advert type, then please do let me know.

Thanks,
Jesse

This is what the "advert" looks like:
JD Power Advert-fs8
The eagle-eyed among you will notice that this doesn't look like an advert. The site carries no mention of the fact this is a sponsored article.
(I've no way of verifying whether JD Power paid for this advert, or even if the blog's author is working with Media Discovery.)

I queried this - surely it's not right that advertising should be displayed in such a manner. Their response?

Thank you for your message.

We prefer it if our adverts are not marked out as such. They tend to be more successful when they look as natural as possible.

Many thanks.

This is, as far as I can tell, an illegal practice.

There are various laws and regulations governing advertising in the UK. The Office of Fair Trading specifically calls out the following practice as illegal under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations, the following is an offence:

Being honest about advertorials

Using editorial content in the media to promote a product where a trader has paid for the promotion (advertorial) without making that clear in the content or by images or sounds clearly identifiable by the consumer.

Can A Blog Get In Trouble For This?

There are two potential risks for bloggers who don't acknowledge the providence of their sponsored content.
Firstly is the issue of legal liability. I am not a lawyer - but I would be very wary of publishing content like this. Regulation 18 states:

Innocent publication of advertisement defence

18.—(1) In any proceedings against a person for an offence under regulation 9, 10, 11 or 12 committed by the publication of an advertisement it shall be a defence for a person to prove that—
he is a person whose business it is to publish or to arrange for the publication of advertisements;
he received the advertisement for publication in the ordinary course of business; and
he did not know and had no reason to suspect that its publication would amount to an offence under the regulation to which the proceedings relate.

I spoke to the ASA who confirmed that it was unlikely an individual publication would get in to trouble - they'd much rather go after the advertiser.

Secondly, major search engines - Google in particular - can completely remove you from their results if it suspects you have been spamming.

In the above JD Power example, the link doesn't use the nofollow attribute which further contributes to its spammy nature.
JD Power Link

What Can Be Done

In the UK, the regulator is the Advertising Standards Authority. Unsurprisingly, they take a keen interest in the online space. After having a chat with their advisers, I have lodged a complaint with the ASA using their online form.

I don't fundamentally disagree with the notion of advertising on blogs - I use Amazon's affiliate scheme to earn a few coins, and I have occasionally run campaigns from ebuzzing. Crucially, I always explicitly say if a post is sponsored and who the sponsor is.

How can you trust a publication if they refuse to tell you where their interests lie?

If you're a blogger and have been approached by company trying to engage in deceptive practices, I strongly suggest you file a formal complaint against them with your local regulator.

Clear Channel's NFC Mistake

I've talked before about advertising hoardings with combined NFC & QR codes. It looks like Clear Channel - the advertising behemoth - is getting into the game.

Spotted all over London are these bus stops with built in advertising poster. Look on the right hand side, and you'll see the interactive element.
Bus Stop with QR NFC

Clear Channel NFC QR It's pretty well designed, although the disclaimer "standard network rates apply" seems a little redundant - and weirdly placed. The QR code is oddly rotated, but that's just my personal preference.

The QR code is large enough to scan easily in broad daylight. If the code was integrated with the poster, it would also been backlit which would have been helpful when it is dark. The NFC scanned easily - once I'd flipped my phone's settings on.

Using a call to action of "Tap" and "Scan" assumes that the users will know what to do - and how to get an app if they need it.

The QR and the NFC both go to unique URLs - helpful for Clear Channel to see from where the hits are coming.

But what happens when you scan the hybrid QR/NFC?

This abomination....

CCNFC

What The Juddering Fuck? Why on Earth would you deploy dozens of these interactive adverts and then not point them anywhere useful? Even if the campaigns aren't ready, couldn't Clear Channel point to their YouTube Channel, or their Twitter feed, or anything!

Some people are going to interact with this poster and come to the conclusion that there's nothing worthwhile to be gained by attempting to scan again.

Clear Channel are really shooting themselves in the foot by deploying this before their technology is ready.

Inferring Facebook's Mobile Use Via Bit.ly

Analysts estimates are always interesting to read - especially if you know the real statistics which they are trying to prophetize.

Even when someone releases "official" statistics, they're usually hard to verify independently, and even harder to analyse by region.

Benedict Evans - who I've had the pleasure of meeting at Mobile Monday - published some very interesting official stats on Facebook's mobile usage.
Enders Facebook Stats-fs8
The statistics show that roughly 44% of Facebook use is "not mobile".

How does that chime with reality?

I've talked before (incessantly!) about how leaky bit.ly is - they allow anyone to view detailed statistics about your marketing campaigns. Why people continue to use them, I've no idea. But, luckily for us, it allows us to get a fairly balanced view of Facebook's userbase.

UK supermarket Tesco have been running this "sponsored story" on Facebook. I assume that it is being pushed out to a large and broadly representative sample of UK Facebook users.
Tesco Facebook Campaign

Using Bit.ly we can see the clickthrough statistics.
Facebook Mobile Stats
You can click on the image for a live view of the stats.

Having run my own tests, it appears that clicks on a Bit.ly link from the Android or iOS app appear as though they come from m.facebook - as do clicks from the mobile web site. So we can't break down the stats any further. That said, it's always useful to get a secondary data point.

People are sharing your links on Facebook. Over half the people clicking on them will be doing so from a mobile phone. Does your site provide a great mobile experience? If not - it's time to up your game.

Revenge of the Spammed

I've moaned before about the crap adverts on social networks. Facebook has suddenly been getting a lot worse. Today they decided that it would be great to show me adverts for a steak restaurant. Which, would be fine, if I hadn't been vegetarian for the last 13 years...

Facebook have been spamming my wall with all sorts of rubbish - dodgy share trading deals, timeshare scams, PPI reclaim cons, malicious Android apps - really bottom of the barrel stuff.

So, as I'm too weak-willed to abandon Facebook, I've started retaliating. At a basic level, I block the stories as spam.
Kleenex Spam
That, hopefully, blocks them from appearing again. I file abuse reports which, hopefully, take up a little bit of Facebook's time.

Mainly, though, I complain to the company - especially if it's a UK one. I write on their wall saying that I don't appreciate them spamming me. I leave "interesting" links on their posts letting others know what think of them. For example, when overpriced smoothie maker "Innocent" started spamming me, I reminded their followers that - far from being innocent - they had taken substantial investment from Coca-Cola. A company with business practices which don't exactly fit Innocent's image.

When BP spammed my wall, I contributed to theirs with videos about people protesting BP's greenwashing of the arts. I also shared the videos and articles with my friends.

I'm not alone in this, it seems. People love telling companies that they don't like their product or their spamming attitude.

This is what happened to Innocent when they started promoting their posts to people who didn't want to see them.
Innocent Smoothie Spam
(I've edited out some of the positive comments - but Innocent deleted my disparaging comments and blocked me from their page - so I think that's fair.)

It's often said that customers prefer telling each other bad news about a company rather than good. What happens when every supposedly positive "sponsored story" gets users telling their friends just how much they despise a spamming brand?

The meme-du-jour is "If you're not paying, that means you're not the customer; you're the product." We are the product being sold and some of us don't like it.

That's the premise of my wife's most recent blog post.

It asks a rather simple and quite unnerving question. What happens when the "product" starts rebelling?

Facebook might not like this attitude, but they made the decision to design a business which sells rational, self interested agents in the first place. If they didn’t want their ‘product’ to rebel against them they shouldn’t have gone into the business of selling something which has a brain.

Liz Eden

I've been told that Facebook won't offer people a way to pay to opt out of advertising. The people who can afford to pay are the ones which advertisers are desperate to target. Will there, I wonder, come a time when the negative publicity generated by resentful products offsets the gains from selling us?

Facebook's Mobile Adverts - Real Stats

Facebook has been getting a lot of criticism for its lack of mobile revenue. A fact it tried to hide from its IPO. Much ink has been spilled, but is it really necessary for Facebook to worry? Here's a quick case study.

Facebook has, in its infinite wisdom, decided that I would be interested in adverts for cancer. Or, perhaps, AXA have decided that 30 something males are a prime market.

The creator of the advert was Equator's Fiona Dow who, judging from her bitly profile just loves posting about cancer.

As I have mentioned several times before, bitly links are a great way to (unintentionally) share your stats. If we look at the clickthrough stats for this advert, we can find some interesting nuggets.

Here's the biggie - referrers shows where people where when they clicked on the link:

In total, nearly half of all clicks came from the mobile site.

Perhaps this is why Facebook hasn't jumped into bed with any dedicated mobile advertiser? It would seem that users are equally willing to click on Facebook's "Sponsored Stories" on mobile as well as web.

(This assumes that AXA targetted both platforms equally).

The only fly in the ointment is, you guessed it, AXA don't have a mobile friendly site.
AXA non-mobile site

I've been banging on about mobile-friendly advertising for years - and still advertisers don't get it! Not everyone has an iPhone. Not everyone who has an iPhone is on WiFi or 3G. Not every one want to have to pinch and zoom. If the first impression you're giving your customers is that you don't care about their needs - don't expect them to stick around too long.

So based on this datum, Facebook users are willing to click on mobile ads - all it now requires is Facebook to show them at appropriate times and advertisers to create mobile-dedicated campaigns.