MediaPost sends me emails with various news items relating to media and advertising. Todays notice included a story from Ad Age that read in part:
A half dozen morning TV shows in large markets, including Atlanta, Denver, and Cleveland, are selling on-air segments to advertisers at $2,500 a pop. The shows, which carry slightly different titles in each city, are slotted into Gannett-owned stations. And the sponsored segments, while briefly identified as being such, are designed to fit seamlessly into the programming. The shows’ standard hosts appear in the segments, which helps erode the line between normal programming and advertising. Most of the advertisers to date have been local–dentists, auto dealers, and home builders–but some regional and national advertisers are also beginning to take advantage of the unique opportunity at these Gannett stations. One, Honey Baked Ham, has purchased segments on morning chat shows in Atlanta and Colorado. Al Tompkins, of the Poynter Institute, a journalism-research school in St. Petersburg, Florida, says he is troubled by the Gannett initiative. “I understand they’re not calling this journalism,” he said, “but it looks and smells a lot like journalism” and therefore has the potential to trick consumers.
You can read the whole article here , registration is required, but it’s free.
Regular readers of DevraDoWrite will correctly guess that I find these developments troublesome; it is yet another slide down the slippery slope. This feels like a bit like a cross between product placement in movies and print advertorials that look like articles, read like feature stories, and have a teeny tiny “advertisement” notice in a margin — but this is more dangerous and deliberately duplicitous. Not only in that “it looks and smells a lot like journalism,” but by virtue of association with a TV host or anchor it implies an endorsement from someone viewers ‘trust’ and it all unfolds right there in your home. Call it trickery, manipulation, or effective marketing, the bottom line is…well, the bottom line. It is all about convincing people to spend their hard-earned ca$h. It’s not that I think people are stupid, but I do think that we are vulnerable. We look increasingly to those who can help to filter, decipher, and/or evaluate the avalanche of information that threatens to bury us daily, and this need makes us susceptible to influence from people perceived to be in-the-know and on our side.