Black ops advertising Native ads, content marketing, and the covert world of the digital sell

I DON'T often watch late night television, which may be why I was caught unawares. Jimmy Fallon's opening monologue began hilariously enough, when abruptly he pivoted to a series of inexplicably weak jokes centered on a forthcoming football game. It slowly dawned on me that I was watching a commercial for NBC's "Sunday Night Football," albeit one baked right into the opening monologue and delivered by Fallon himself. The realization that something you thought to be "real" is actually an advertisement is an increasingly common, if unsettling, sensation. Mara Einstein calls it "content confusion," and if her book, "Black Ops Advertising," is right, we're in for even more such trickery, indeed a possible future where nearly everything becomes hidden commercial propaganda of one form or another. She forecasts the potential of a "world where there is no real content: Everything we experience is some form of sales pitch." Einstein, a former advertising executive turned media professor (who, among other things, worked campaigns for Uncle Ben's and Miller Lite), makes it clear that things were not always this way. Once upon a time the line between editorial and advertising, if not exactly a Chinese wall, was somewhat clearer. Einstein's well-researched and accomplished book is mainly about the effort to tear down that wall. The sledgehammers and pick axes in this case are things like "sponsored content," "native advertising" and "content marketing" designed to fool you into thinking they are real. Such stealth advertising may entertain or inform, yet it also brands, or more cleverly, facilitates a later branding exercise or sales pitch. The handoff can be smooth enough that you don't notice you've been steered to exit through the gift shop. "Black Ops" presents some startling examples of stealth advertising. Remember that guy who in 2012 jumped out of a helium balloon at 128,000 feet for a new world record? Covered widely in the media, it was all, according to Einstein, a disguised Red Bull marketing campaign, but one where Red Bull's role was so discrete as to be almost invisible. You may also recall the audacious "tagging" of Air Force One by a graffiti artist named Marc Ecko, which has been viewed nearly a million times on YouTube. It was a hoax intended for the branding of a clothing and accessories label. That "ad" fooled so many members of the public and press that it was awarded the top prize for digital media at the annual Cannes Lions advertising festival. THE BOOK is slightly guilty of exaggerating the novelty of present-day advertising techniques. Content that doubles as brand advertising is not exactly new. In the 1980s, "The Transformers" and "G.I. Joe" were popular children's cartoons but also advertisements, and so of course was the much beloved "Mickey Mouse Club" back in the 1960s. The idea of inventing media stories for commercial purpose also has a long pedigree, dating to at least the late 1920s, when Lucky Strike staged a protest (the "torches of liberty") featuring attractive women demanding the right to smoke outdoors as a part of suffragist liberation (yielding, ultimately, an equal right to lung cancer). Subliminal advertising, perhaps the blackest of all black ops, was popular in the 1950s, until it was banned. The difference, Einstein argues, lies in how much effort is going toward the dark arts. It is, she suggests, for one simple reason: that we, the public, are so good at avoiding or ignoring traditional advertising. We are fickle fish, cynical creatures who have already been hooked so many times that the simpler lures no longer work. We avoid ads using devices as simple as the remote control (originally conceived as an ad-avoidance technology) and as sophisticated as ad-blocking phones (thanks, Apple). Many of us have developed a mental blindness that helps us see through advertising as if it were not there. Indeed, ad avoidance has become a lifestyle, so much so that some people will simply declare, "I don't watch advertising" the same way one might declare adherence to a gluten-free diet. Einstein's book wanders from its main topic into a fuller review of contemporary advertising practice, including pseudoengagement on social media, mass harvesting of private data and other unappealing practices. Perhaps the most important contribution she makes is providing a clear sense of what free content actually costs. There was a time when the idealists among us prophesied that the 21st century would be a golden age of free stuff, powered by a culture of sharing, and that targeted advertising would be a blessing for consumers. Today that vision has soured and even seems like a bad joke given how plagued we are by the rise of stealth advertising, the invasions of privacy, the proliferation of clickbait and stalking advertising, and the general degradation of much of the web. Einstein is not enthusiastic about contemporary advertising practice, and few of us are likely to regard constant deception as attractive. But what's the remedy? One, briefly mentioned by Einstein, is legal. The Federal Trade Commission regards advertising posing as legitimate content to be an illegal form of "consumer deception." Einstein calls for more enforcement, but admits that it's not easy. What does one do, for example, about the many movies (like "The Transformers") and reality shows ("Keeping Up With the Kardashians") that are simultaneously entertainment and advertisement? EINSTEIN is not the first former marketing executive to turn on her profession; James Rorty, in 1934, wrote of his colleagues: "They are dead men. Their bones are Bakelite. Their blood is water, their flesh is pallid - yes, prick them and they do not bleed." But unlike Rorty, who wanted to destroy advertising, she would prefer to save it: She is nostalgic for the recent past, when audiences sitting through commercials made deception unnecessary. But if that's the remedy, it is a lost cause: No one who figures out how to avoid advertising willingly goes back. Einstein too quickly discards the most important remedy for advertising's abuses: paying for content. A broader historical view can remind us that adsupported media competes with paid media (like HBO, film, books). Those who don't want to live in a world constantly trying to trick us into watching ads may have the most impact by voting with their dollars and starving the beast of the attention it needs to survive. Paying for things (Facebook, if it let you pay, Einstein tells us, might be $12 a year) strikes at the heart of the business model, and indeed a partial revolt is already underway, as suggested by the popularity of advertising-free subscription services like Netflix. It is a reminder that advertisingsupported entertainment is hardly indelible or eternal, but a relatively recent invention whose future is insecure. From this perspective, the rise of black ops advertising may be less a sign of power than of desperation. Approaching a world in which 'everything we experience is some form of sales pitch.' TIM WU is the author of "The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside our Heads"

Einstein (media studies, Queens Coll.; Compassion, Inc.) sounds the alarm on the -pervasive, insidious nature of the new digital advertising landscape and the effects it has on consumer choices and traditional journalism. While buyers today may see themselves as savvy and difficult to fool, Einstein asserts that even those who understand advertising strategy are increasingly duped by online commercial content disguised as straightforward news and entertainment. The book takes readers on a crash course in modern advertising techniques, starting with traditional word of mouth and relatively outdated online ad styles such as pop-ups and banner advertising, moving into the more difficult-to-discern native advertising and content marketing. The author argues that when advertising is masked, the impartiality of journalism suffers, public life is commercialized, and media consumers unknowingly provide advertisers with incredibly detailed data profiles that are then used to create even more narrowly targeted and cleverly concealed promotions. VERDICT This quick, informative read will serve both casual readers and those with a particular interest in advertising, online culture, and the commercialization of everyday life.-Rebecca Brody, Westfield State Univ., MA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

....Even with twenty-plus years of marketing experience, I didn't initially realize this was an advertising ploy. I watched the jump as others had and never once thought I was being sold an extreme energy drink. I thought I was watching news. After I discovered Red Bull's involvement, though, I felt used. Okay, so Red Bull doesn't want to use traditional advertising. Fine. But if the content is worthy of my attention why aren't they willing to put their name on it? The answer is easy: Red Bull is well aware that if I knew there was an advertiser involved, I--and likely most of us--would not watch it. Years of remote controls, DVRs, and now "banner blindness" and ad blockers have taught advertisers that consumers are utterly adept at circumventing advertising. In response, they have turned to new and improved forms of clandestine marketing. Obscured persuasion, broadly known as stealth marketing, is defined "as the use of surreptitious marketing practices that fail to disclose or reveal the true relationship with the company that produces or sponsors the marketing message."[i] While not new, these hidden marketing practices have reached new heights and more devious methods in the age of social media. And with those methods have come a multitude of names--covert marketing, undercover marketing, embedded marketing and more recently, content marketing, native advertising, buzz marketing, and brand journalism, among many, many others. There are few straightforward definitions for these strategies, but the goal is clear: find ways to get products in front of people without them realizing they are being persuaded to purchase and--the piece de resistance--get them to push the products to their friends, creating a world where we are in a constant state of buying or selling. Whatever the label, however, it comes down to this: advertisers can camouflage their sales message in only one of two ways 1) hide the advertising within existing content environments or 2) create the pitch themselves and make it look like something other than advertising. The first of these is native advertising, the second content marketing. Native advertising is a sales pitch created to be seamlessly integrated into a website or social media feed so visitors will click on the advertiser-sponsored content as readily as they do the non-sponsored editorial. The best example of this is BuzzFeed, a popular source for news and information online. Anyone who has spent time on the site or the app, or had BuzzFeed content forwarded through social media, has been privy to "listicles" like "51 Thoughts Every Lady Who Shaves Her Legs Has Had" or "12 Life Lessons We all Learned Our Freshman Year of College" or quizzes like "What Fraggle Rock Character Are You?" The difference with the middle one is that it is sponsored by Target, an advertiser targeting students going back to school. How do you know this? Because of a teeny, tiny little orange rectangle that says "promoted by" located on top of an equally small logo. But native advertising isn't only on BuzzFeed. It's on Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times website, which launched its in-house marketing group with a piece about women in prison which was sponsored by the Netflix's series Orange is the New Black.[ii] On the other hand, content marketing is made up of "valuable, relevant, and consistent content," per the Content Marketing Institute, that is used to appeal to a specific target audience. Red Bull creates content that communicates "extreme" based on alternative music, sports, or technology that appeals to its audience of over-caffeinated college students who dream of doing something extreme but probably never will. In another example, Chipotle creates a 3-minute, tear-jerking video with an accompanying website including a downloadable game called "The Scarecrow" to promote the negative aspects of processed food while presenting Chipotle as a healthier and more sustainable alternative. And Pennzoil produced a documentary called "Breaking Barriers" about breaking the speed limit. While the oil company's involvement with the venture was widely presented in the advertising trade press, Pennzoil does not appear on the consumer-focused National Geographic website, the cable channel where the programming aired. Shrewder still are the sponsored tweets, blog posts, and Vines that never mention their corporate connections. Excerpted from Black Ops Advertising: Native Ads, Content Marketing and the Covert World of the Digital Sell by Mara Einstein All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.