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INTRODUCTION

WHY ADS DON’T LOOK LIKE ADS

On October 14, 2012, Felix Baumgartner attempted the impossible—to dive from outer space going faster than the speed of sound. Wearing what looked like a battery pack out of a 1950s sci-fi movie, millions of people watched as this Austrian jumped from a space pod surrounded by darkness to land safely in a sunlit field 128,000 feet below. Successfully traveling at 844 miles per hour, this leap was a triumph of technology and one man’s fearlessness that became the talk of the world, a twenty-first-century version of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon.

Years of planning had gone into this. Technologies were developed, test jumps executed, and millions of dollars spent. Numerous television networks were asked to be part of the project, and many turned it down. You can’t really blame them. This project was dangerous. Weather conditions had to be perfect. The network and production crew had to be ready at a moment’s notice. And there was the real possibility that the network would show, live, a man jumping to his death. Discovery Channel took on the challenge and aired this daredevil’s plunge, creating one of the highest-rated programs in the network’s history.

But this exceedingly risky endeavor wasn’t a NASA mission or a physics experiment out of Carnegie Mellon. It was an extreme event called Stratos that had been developed and paid for by Red Bull, a producer of energy drinks popular with teens, young adults, and college students cramming for finals. Marketed with the tagline “Red Bull gives you wings,” the product is all about communicating that the company is on the cutting edge of pop culture.¹ So cutting edge that the only clues to commercialization in the video are subtle displays of the Red Bull logo that fit seamlessly into the content—on the space pod, on Baumgartner’s space suit, on t-shirts of people watching in the crowd below, and so on. The camera never lingers on these symbols and the viewer’s attention is on the fantastic achievement about to occur, so unless you know to look for them they are easy to miss.

Incredibly, then, all this work, money, and even risk to a person’s life were nothing more than an elaborate, exceptionally well-executed piece of advertising.²

Stunning events with arresting visuals like Stratos are part of a growing advertising phenomenon known as content marketing, a straightforward-sounding yet ultimately vague way to describe the means through which advertisers get people to spend time watching or reading “content” that the advertiser has paid for. The “content” masquerades as “news” (or entertainment) and, when executed to perfection, results in successful stunts like the Red Bull leap from space. This trend has become so pervasive that marketers are starting to proclaim that content marketing might soon become the only type of marketing left. Chances are, though, that you’ve never heard of content marketing, and that’s exactly the point.

A key aspect of this marketing tool is to engage consumers without their realizing they’ve taken part in a promotional initiative. Red Bull did this brilliantly. In praising the Stratos jump as one of the best advertising campaigns of the twenty-first century, a senior executive noted in industry magazine Advertising Age: “The beauty of it was that it didn’t feel like you were being sold something.”³

Red Bull—and now almost every consumer marketer on the planet (close to 90 percent)—uses content marketing. They use it because it works. In this case, 37 million people watched a short YouTube video, while others viewed longer more detailed versions, or edits in different languages, or a documentary on Discovery, or as the lede news story in print or on television—free media for the brand that totaled in the tens of millions of dollars in the U.S. and conservative estimates suggest that this totaled more than six billion Euros worldwide in the first three days alone.⁴ This space jump is a small part of the company’s larger marketing plan in which traditional advertising is shunned in favor of sponsoring extreme sporting events, funding unknown musicians, and developing cutting-edge technology. Content about these experiences appear on the Red Bull YouTube channel, a site that in 2015 topped more than one billion views, and they are presented through documentaries, magazines, and reality series produced by Red Bull Media House. But the goal is not only viewership, it is sales. And the Red Bull content initiative paid off handsomely. In the first six months after the Stratos jump, sales rose seven percent to $1.6 billion.⁵

One small step for man . . . one giant leap for Red Bull.

CONTENT CONFUSION

Even with twenty-plus years of marketing experience, I didn’t initially realize that this was an advertising ploy. I watched the jump as others had, and I never once thought that I was being sold an extreme energy drink. I thought I was watching news.

That Red Bull doesn’t opt to use traditional advertising is their prerogative. But if the content is worthy of our attention, why doesn’t the company attach its name to it? The answer is easy: Red Bull is well aware that if we knew an advertiser was involved, 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.”⁶ 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 subtly, so they don’t realize they are being persuaded to purchase those products, as well as—the pièce de résistance—to push those products to their friends, creating a world where we are in a constant state of buying or selling.

Whatever the label, it comes down to the fact that 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 is content marketing.

Native advertising is designed to be seamlessly integrated into a website or social media feed such that visitors will click on the advertiser-sponsored content as readily as they do the nonsponsored 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 who’s 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,” as well as quizzes like “What Fraggle Rock Character Are You?” The difference with the middle article is that it is sponsored by Target, an advertiser promoting to students going back to school. How do you know this? Because of a teeny, tiny orange rectangle that says “promoted by” located on the article on top of an equally small logo. But native advertising isn’t only on BuzzFeed. It’s on Facebook and Twitter, and it’s even on the New York Times website, which launched its in-house marketing group with a piece about women in prison that was sponsored by the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black.⁷

On the other hand, content marketing, according to the Content Marketing Institute, is made up of “valuable, relevant, and consistent content” that is used to appeal to a specific target audience. Red Bull creates content that communicates the idea of “extreme” using alternative music, exhilarating sports, or cutting-edge technology that appeal to its audience of over-caffeinated college students who dream of doing something extreme but probably never will. Chipotle created a three-minute, tear-jerking video with an accompanying website that included a downloadable game called “The Scarecrow,” all of it meant 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 covered in the advertising trade press, Pennzoil does not appear on the consumer-focused National Geographic website or on the cable channel where the programming aired. Shrewder still are the sponsored tweets, blog posts, and Vines that never mention their corporate connections.

All of this advertising—and it is advertising, whether marketers call it native advertising or content marketing or anything else—is entertaining while appearing informative. We waste endless hours online reading this news clip or watching that video post, only to realize in the end that we haven’t interacted with anything of depth, and we can’t figure out why. Here’s the reason: marketing is not meant to engage our intellect; it is structured to elicit emotions. In pursuit of those emotions—typically awe or anger or amusement—we willingly continue to watch or read. After all, what’s one more cat video, especially when it’s so cute that you just have to share it with your friends? The problem is that it’s like eating potato chips; you can never have just one.

That’s because user interfaces are designed to keep us enraptured and plugged in. We are glued to a screen in our pocket, on our desk, or by our bedside twenty-four hours a day. Mobile devices are electronic pacifiers, designed to be incredibly addictive. Notifications, while sometimes helpful, are designed as reward cues that give our brain little jolts of pleasure that tether us to the technology.⁸ The techniques are so effective that a majority of eighteen to eighty-five-year-olds found that social media is harder to resist than smoking, drinking, spending money, sleeping, and sex.⁹ More statistics: Facebook users are on the site 81 hours per year; office workers check their email 30-40 times per hour, and we switch between devices 21 times per hour.¹⁰ In 2014, Americans on average spent 159 minutes per day on their computers, 163 minutes on tablets, and 134 minutes using smartphones for things other than voice. Only five years ago, those numbers were 184, 21, and 40 respectively.¹¹ Certainly much of this is due to the wide availability of broadband, the improved technology of smartphones, and the proliferation and addictive qualities of social media. However, that alone does not lead us to stare at our iPhones or Galaxys. It is the smartly crafted, data-driven advertising dressed up to look like an innocuous article or laugh-out-loud video.

As this affect-producing content mushrooms throughout the media pipeline, traditional news producers must compete against it and do so at a distinct disadvantage. While advertising sources create content with the express purpose of giving you something you want—advice, information, a coupon, a smile, a mindless break—news organizations are tasked with giving us information we need. To address that disadvantage, news producers reframe their stories to feel more like advertising, luring in readers (and advertisers) by using what one reporter called “whorebait.” Whorebait—or more politely, clickbait—describes articles with headlines like “You Won’t Believe What Happens Next” or “Here’s The Problem with Self-Driving Cars Becoming a Mainstream Reality” or “Everyone poops, but 2.6 billion people do it in a really crappy way.” More fundamentally, publishers and advertisers are in head-to-head competition with one another, because publishers are advertisers, advertisers are publishers, and the content both of them produce is an amalgamation of whatever they think will get you to “engage”—that is, spend time with them.

To be fair, to some extent the idea of clickbait is not new. Under the broadcast television model, we called it lowest common denominator programming. Think here of The Bachelor or The Voice or a myriad of other series—reality or otherwise—that are short on art and long on formula, but that are ultimately fun to watch, so many people do. The larger the audience, the more money a network makes through advertising, which leads networks to offer lots of “reality” and other mindless content while providing limited doses of news and PBS-like fare. In print, the corresponding example would be People magazine or a supermarket tabloid.

The difference today—and this is key—is that the race between advertisers and publishers centers on creating content that grabs our attention while hiding its corporate sales pitch. It is “black ops advertising,” and it is the purposeful masking of corporate bias by either the advertiser or the publisher so that we can’t discern the underlying perspective—is it an ad? Is it an article? Can it be both? This state of uncertainty is what I am calling “content confusion.”

Content confusion occurs when advertising does not look like advertising, making it virtually impossible to separate hard news content from a soft sales pitch. The ultimate progression of this trajectory is a world where there is no real content: everything we experience is some form of sales pitch. While that extreme is unlikely to happen, it’s already the case that more and more advertising blends in seamlessly with noncommercial content, overwhelming the media environment and pushing real news further and further to the margins. There is a simple reason for this: if the goal is profit, legitimate content must take a back seat to clickbait and quizzes and entertaining cat videos, items that get us to spend time online in the hopes that we’ll purchase a product.

Getting us to click on content is only part of the equation. Once we read the “article” or watch the video, the hope is that we’ll share it, causing the content to go viral: spreading from one consumer to another because of its entertainment value. Viral marketing is essential because it uses our social networks to sell products. We promote the brand, we tell our friends and family to watch the video or buy a product or “Like” a page, and because the endorsement is from a known and trusted commodity, our friends and family are more inclined to pay attention. This is word-of-mouth marketing (WOM), and it is the backbone of the new digital stealth marketing ecosystem. Marketers love word-of-mouth marketing because it is, and always has been, the most effective form of sales. Further: if the goal is to obscure the advertising message, word-of-mouth marketing is also the least suspect. After all, if a friend tells us they liked the latest Jurassic Park movie, there’s no reason for us not to believe it. Unfortunately, what we also come to believe is that amassing friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter is ultimately about sharing with our compatriots. It is not: it is about creating an audience for advertisers. Our relationships, then, become means of facilitating market transactions, or in the parlance of the market: they have been monetized.¹²

Further complicating the distinctions between what is “real” and what is a marketing ploy is that we have taken on the tools of the marketer. We tweet, we post, we even add the corporate name. One example of this is #alexfromtarget. In November 2014, a teenage girl went into her local Target store and saw a cute guy bagging items at the cash register. She took a picture of Alex (his name was on his work badge), posted it on Twitter, and created the hashtag #alexfromtarget. Teens started retweeting his picture, and in twenty-four hours, Alex had more than 300,000 followers and was all over the news. This was not a PR stunt—it was an everyday teen acting as a marketer for the discount store. In another example, eight-year-old Evan, star of EvanTube, creates videos to review toys and videogames in a family-friendly format. This pint-sized pitchman rakes in over a million dollars a year and has more views than Katy Perry.¹³ So are Evan and his YouTube channel advertisements for the products reviewed, ads for Evan personally, or legitimate consumer reviews? Hard to tell.

By now, you might wonder: was the article I read this morning paid for by Apple? Was that BuzzFeed quiz a promotion? Is that post on Facebook “organic,” or did a marketer pay for me to see it? The newspaper article, maybe; BuzzFeed, almost definitely; and with Facebook, any content is increasingly likely to be advertising because the company continuously manipulates its algorithm to improve profitability by forcing marketers to pay for content. Most people have begun to suspect this, at least in the case of Facebook. We have also gotten savvier about how marketers use data to promote products to us. We know that at least a portion of online reviews are fake or paid for,¹⁴ and Millennials, in particular, are not all that sensitive about giving up personal data for convenience if it means that they can get a discount or find out about the latest trend, lest they face the dreaded FOMO (fear of missing out).¹⁵

But what if you don’t know that a blog post has a marketer behind it, or that the celebrity tweeting about a lip balm was paid $20,000 for those 140 characters, or that a newspaper article was sponsored by an online streaming video service, or that a documentary you watched on National Geographic was paid for by an oil company? If you knew it was advertising, chances are you’d speed by it the same way you zap past a commercial on your DVR or dump your junk mail in the recycle bin. Or if you did watch it, aware of the content’s sponsorship, you might approach it with a more critical or cynical eye—something companies do not want you to do.

The line between unbiased content and commercials has gotten so blurred that even the language around these concepts has changed. Advertisers no longer think of themselves as producing commercials; they produce “films.” Marketing departments are increasingly staffed by former journalists who labor not in a “bullpen,” but in what are offensively called “newsrooms.” Few of the former journalists I spoke with have an issue with creating this biased work because they claim that they wouldn’t produce a piece that would offend a consumer. Unfortunately, that right there is part of the problem.

SOCIAL MEDIA: “FRIEND” AND FOE

Content confusion is exacerbated by social media, where native ads fit most indigenously into the noncorporate content. But creating engaging content is not enough. Marketers also need to create a relationship with us—they want to be our friend—so that we will feel indebted to them or inspired to share our information and experiences with others. This might be as simple as our posting the promotional video for the upcoming season of Orange Is the New Black, “Liking” a charity, or tweeting about the great service we got at our last stay at a Hilton.

To build these relationships, the company must get our attention. This is done through social media (and facilitated by data), which enables direct interaction between companies and consumers. Advertisers call this customer relationship marketing, or CRM. This relationship is important because the more time we spend with the product, the more likely we are to become a customer or a repeat customer. Having one-to-one connections with consumers is very new for marketers. Relationships, in contrast to yelling at someone to buy via a commercial, take time to build, and digital technologies allow for types of company-consumer interactions that traditional media technologies didn’t. “Social is not for selling, it’s for social,” is the battle cry I heard over and over at the marketing events I attended. It frankly felt creepy, and if not creepy, sad.

Many of us buy into the attention from marketers because being seen online ties into our sense of self. “Like” something on Facebook, and it shows others who we are. Better still, if someone from the brand company we’ve “Liked” interacts with us via social media, we feel acknowledged, even appreciated. In one amusing example of social engagement, Groupon made a Facebook post about a product called the banana bunker, which protects the phallic-shaped fruit. Not surprisingly, people posted numerous sex jokes: “What do you do if your banana curves the other way?” and “Do they come with bananacidal lube?” In response, Groupon engaged in witty repartee: “Good News—the Bunker is Omni-directional!” and “Why would you commit bananacide?! Monster!”¹⁶ Consumers were enthralled (12,000 comments, 18,000 Likes, and 43,000 shares), the event got press coverage, and the banana bunker sold out in less than two hours. In a more G-rated version of the same idea, the fast food restaurant Sonic ran a campaign called “Back-to-School Summaries” where they asked students to submit book titles from their summer reading list. The company then responded with a synopsis in ten words or less. These included Hamlet: “Wants revenge for his father’s death, goes a little overboard”; A Clockwork Orange: “Futuristic totalitarian society. Violence, violence, violence,” and finally, Fifty Shades of Grey: “Nice try. There’s no way you’re reading that for school.” These examples are fun and fairly harmless, like watching a comedian, only in an asynchronous format.

Other sorts of relationship building via digital technologies, however, allow for extremely individualized interactions that are exceedingly invasive and border on stalking. For instance, Laura Spica—an average American dog owner—tweeted a picture of her dog looking out the window for squirrels. Purina tweeted back the dog’s picture but with a twist: they had outfitted the dog by drawing in a hat, sunglasses, and a jacket. Purina had also drawn a badge in the upper left hand corner of the picture saying “Squirrel Patrol,” and underneath the dog they had written, “starring HENRY the dog.” The dog owner was so enthralled by the attention that she tweeted back:

@Purina Oh-Em-Gee! You pimped my #PurinaDog! That’s possibly the cutest thing I’ve ever seen!!! #SquirrelPatrol #HenryDog¹⁷

In under a minute, the company had reached out to someone and moved her from talking about her dog to promoting Purina. Just like #alexattarget, Laura didn’t have to attach a brand name to her post, but she did, and Purina loved her for it.

Purina is able to engage with Laura and other consumers like her because they scan the Internet in real time looking for mentions of cats and dogs—an activity known as social listening—and determine how they can insert themselves into the conversation. Did Laura buy Purina? I don’t know. But she did become a brand ambassador in response to some brief corporate attention. And it didn’t feel like marketing, either to her or to the followers with whom she shared the tweet.

Undergirding all of this one-on-one interaction is big data—large stores of information made available by digital technologies—a topic we will cover at length in Chapter 5. For the moment, bear in mind that media and marketing companies track our every digital move. Put a pair of shoes in an online cart, decide not to buy them, and just wait for the image of those flats to follow you from website to website and from computer to cell phone to iPad and soon to your smart TV, a technique known as retargeting.¹⁸ And by now, you likely know that the Google results you receive in response to searches are not the same as the ones your spouse or child or business associate sees. This is because as you roam the web, you leave trails of data for marketers to analyze—and to sell to others—in a never-ending attempt to persuade you to buy even more consumer goods. How you have moved around the web determines not only the ads that you see, but the types of sites that will make it to the top of the Google results. It isn’t merely Google that uses your information to serve their business needs: Netflix created “House of Cards” using viewership data from their site (more on that later), Pinterest is the social media equivalent of a consumer focus group, and I could go on and on. The list of sites that use our information to garner information is virtually endless.

In the perhaps the most notorious case of marketing research, Facebook manipulated users’ news feeds in the summer of 2014 to see if they could influence user emotions. The company increased the amount of negative content on the news feeds of 689,003 people to see if it would make them sadder, testing a theory known as emotional contagion. The question was: could Facebook use its algorithms to make an emotion spread like a virus from one person to another? In short, it worked: fewer positive posts in the news feed led to more negative posts being written, and vice versa.¹⁹ Think about that: Facebook used their site to discover that they had the ability to stage-manage people’s feelings. It sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Facebook claimed that this was legitimate product research and that they were protected by the legal notice that users agree to when they sign up for the site.²⁰

Bottom line: the Internet is one giant marketing research experiment. The vast stores of data generated from spending time online enable marketers to tailor content to individualized wants and needs, to develop relationships with consumers, and through those relationships to compel us to engage with increasingly cloaked commercial content and to share it with our social groups.

DECLINING REVENUES = BLURRED LINES

Media and marketing have merged because the revenue models that buoy the production of noncommercial content are imploding. The long-term consequences of this are likely to be far worse than we can imagine, both in terms of the denigration of content and the amount of money we as individuals will all have to pay out of pocket for content that used to be free because it was advertising supported. In the short term, the “solution” is to hide the advertising—a choice that has far-ranging fallout.

In brief: media companies generate revenue either by selling advertising or via a hybrid model of selling advertising and subscriptions.²¹ In its simplest form, for example, broadcast TV networks sell advertising, and magazines sell a combination of ads and subscriptions. Cable networks also work in this way: a network like MTV, say, gets money from advertising and a monthly fee from the local cable operator, such as Comcast or Time Warner.

The cost of an ad is determined by how many people see the ad (ratings) and by who those people are. The more people that watch a commercial, the more expensive it is. That is why commercials in the Super Bowl—the most watched program on television, with tens of millions of viewers—go for more than $3 million for a thirty-second spot. But cost is not just about tonnage. Advertisers want to reach some types of people more than others, and they will pay handsomely to reach those desirable consumer groups. Young men, for example, are a notoriously hard-to-reach but valuable target audience, and advertisers will pay up to twice as much money to reach them as they will to reach many female demographic groups, who tend to watch more television.

Obviously, companies with a combined revenue model have been better able to withstand the ups and downs of a volatile advertising market. MTV might lose advertising dollars in a down market, but the company retains a substantial monthly revenue stream from cable operators. In 2013, for example, MTV received a monthly average of 39 cents per subscriber and had 99 million subscribers, so their annual subscription fees totaled more than $463 million.²² But any security that combined revenue models might have provided no longer exists. Digital technologies are threatening not only advertising revenues, but also hybrid revenue models.

In terms of television advertising, a combination of delayed viewership, reduced viewership, and the practice of viewing online has led to declining ratings and a concomitant decline in revenues.²³ Nielsen, the agency that determines the viewership of TV programs, counts C3: commercial ratings for live viewership, plus anyone who watches their DVR within three days of the broadcast. Thus people who record programs on DVRs but put off watching them for several days are lost in the ratings numbers. Ratings have declined further because people are simply shunning TV in favor of YouTube, Netflix, and other video outlets. More troubling still is the migration of TV viewing to tablets and mobile devices. That’s because when you watch Scandal or The Walking Dead online, that viewership cannot be tracked by Nielsen.²⁴

As the audience is moving from TV to online, so too is advertising spending, and this is happening at a faster and faster rate. Up to now, television has been immune to declines in advertising spending because of its ability to reach a large audience, something no other medium can do. In 2014, though, spending shifted for the first time away from traditional media to digital. Expectations are that those spending patterns will continue, particularly in light of the fact that in 2015, Procter & Gamble (P&G) and Unilever, two of the world’s largest advertisers, planned to spend 30 to 35 percent of their budgets on digital, with some of those dollars being found at the expense of television.²⁵ These advertisers and others are shifting their spending to follow consumers, but they are also doing it because advertising online is significantly cheaper. This low cost advertising is great for marketers, not so good for media properties, whether offline or on.

In terms of subscriptions, cable companies are seeing declines as never before. More people (and particularly Millennials) are “cord cutters” or even “cord nevers,” people who are either giving up their cable subscriptions or who’ve never bought one because they can receive all the programming they want online. Cable homes have dropped from 70 percent of American homes to 57 percent in the last fifteen years.²⁶ These “cordless” folks are the reason we are seeing more direct-to-consumer program options (called OTT, or over-the-top content, like HBO Now and CBS All Access), in addition to the propagation of streaming options from companies like Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix, a site which alone accounts for more than twenty-eight hours per month of viewing per subscriber.²⁷ According to Nielsen, more than 40 percent of U.S. households subscribe to at least one of these types of video streaming services.²⁸ Fewer subscribers mean not only less money for the cable operators, but also for the TV networks that they carry.

While broadcast and cable television, as well as newspapers and magazines, are struggling, Google—an organization that produces no content—generated $50 billion in ad income. That’s more than twice that of all newspapers.²⁹ Think about that: the one company that spends absolutely nothing to create entertainment or news is blowing everyone else out of the water. And not surprisingly, the only media segment expected to experience increased advertising revenue is digital, which was predicted to grow by 19 percent in 2015 and to outpace TV spending by 2018.³⁰ Do you see how badly this could go?

From an economic viewpoint it is obvious why this is happening. In the 1980s, before cable took off, 90 percent of Americans watched one of the three major broadcast channels. Reaching prospective customers was easy: make a commercial and put it on network TV. After cable became ubiquitous, broadcasters could still reach a significant audience with its most popular shows. For example, during its run in the 1990s Seinfeld regularly reached more than 30 million viewers. Today, a major hit like The Big Bang Theory only reaches half that number, yet still commands a steep payment for a thirty-second commercial—close to $350,000. Since television networks continued to charge exorbitant prices yet could no longer accumulate large audiences, marketers began to think that producing their own content made more sense.

Crucially, it was not the mere existence of digital but rather the advent of social media that drove the rise of content marketing. Companies had been able to create blogs and websites for decades. What they had not been able to do was drive people to their sites, or better still, have people disseminate their message for them. With Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram, companies can get their brand messages in front of consumers at a fraction of what it costs to produce and broadcast a TV commercial. It’s a no-brainer.

The importance of this decline in advertising dollars in TV and print cannot be overstated. As media companies have become increasingly desperate for revenues, the wall between church and state (editorial and advertising) has come crumbling down, enabling advertising to invade the editorial realm.

In the past, media organizations would work with advertisers to help them achieve their marketing objectives, while channeling those objectives within defined parameters. Marketers talked with the ad sales people at a magazine or TV network, and PR pros pitched the editorial staff or programming executives, trying to work their way into the editorial space. Yet editorial staff members fought tirelessly against bowing to the wishes of advertisers, particularly in the print realm. To do so was anathema to their journalistic integrity. The best an advertiser could hope for was that their ad would be placed next to content that related to their product. For instance, an ad for Dole Raisins might be placed in a magazine next to a recipe for oatmeal raisin cookies, or better yet, an article about how eating more raisins is good for your health.

Today, in pursuit of advertiser dollars, almost anything goes. A publication might produce a two-page spread of recipes, or a TV morning show might create a several-minute segment around how to integrate raisins into a healthy diet, both paid for by Dole. It’s not as if executives in TV and print didn’t see this change in the relationship between advertising and editorial coming. But still, no one seems to know how this will net out for legacy media, or what the ultimate consequences will be now that editorial integrity has been forced to utterly kowtow to the market.

Advertising and editorial become further conflated online, where advertising is allocated to one of three buckets: paid, owned, and earned media. Paid media is like traditional advertising, and might include display ads on a website, like a banner ad or a pre-roll on a video. Paid media also includes sponsorships, such as when a company’s advertising overtakes a website, as well as paid search, like the ads you see on Google. In traditional marketing, paid media would be the foundation of an advertising campaign. Online, though, it only serves to support owned media and earned media.

Owned media typically refers to the marketer’s website, but may also include blogs, mobile sites, and social media accounts like Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, or blogs on Tumblr. Websites supply information and give consumers a way to buy products; social, as we have seen, helps to create and sustain relationships. Both are meant to drive earned media.

Earned media is “when customers become the channel”³¹—that is, word of mouth. It can also include PR work performed through traditional media or bloggers. For example, in the case of the banana bunker, there was no paid advertising: Groupon’s continuous posting on Facebook represented owned media, and the press attention and the tens of thousands of shares and Likes were earned media—that is, free advertising.

BLACK OPS ADVERTISING

Over the last two years, I have attended conferences, talked to industry insiders, and analyzed an endless number of surreptitious marketing campaigns across a wide range of media platforms. It turns out that the marketing prognosticators were only partly right. While content marketing has become pervasive, it is part of a larger overall trend of the muddying of advertising and editorial: that is, black ops advertising.

The correlation to combat is purposeful. Marketing has always been framed as contentious and militaristic. Marketers have objectives that they need to achieve: they use a variety of sophisticated strategies to achieve those objectives, and then they operationalize those strategies through the use of tactics. And of course, consumers—that is, you and I—are targets. On the ground, this might translate into setting sales goals (objective), stealing customers from competitors (strategy), and then offering coupons for anyone willing to switch brands (tactic). This is what T-Mobile did, for instance, when they got customers to switch from AT&T by paying early termination fees (ETFs), offering up to $300 in trade-in credit towards a new phone, and not requiring a long-term contract. Thus, by targeting young, budget-conscious consumers, the company was able to increase their sales by executing their strategy of stealing customers from their competition.

Just as technology has enabled today’s military to move from obvious bombing assaults to covert actions and drone attacks launched from a distance, so too advertising has revised its strategies from loud and disruptive to subtle, camouflaged, and even subversive.³² Red and white Coca-Cola signs, Nike “Just Do It” commercials, and McDonald’s golden arches no longer cut it. Instead, news feeds and social media ads are barely noted as being “sponsored” or “promoted,” disguising themselves as content from someone you know. As part of T-Mobile’s strategy described above, the company provided customizable “Dear John” letters that people could post to Facebook via a specialized app to explain that they were moving to T-Mobile and to specify which cell carrier they were dumping. More than 80,000 people were willing to take the time to fill out the ad—and make no mistake that this was an ad—and post the letter to their news feeds, suggesting that by enabling them to vent their frustration with their existing cell phone carrier, the company had struck an emotional chord.

Gaming our emotions, tapping into needs, and using those to appear to befriend us is part and parcel of this “black ops” phenomenon. In fact, it has led to a fundamental paradigm shift in advertising: instead of telling us to buy, Buy, BUY, marketers “engage” with us so that we will share, Share, SHARE. It is the ultimate subtle sell.

Of course, T-Mobile is just one example. Do you share Jimmy Fallon videos or John Oliver’s latest tirade? You are not alone. Millions of people do. Maybe you are a fan of Grumpy Cat. That brand reportedly earned $100 million in the last two years, no small thanks to people sending the furry creature’s angry puss around the Internet.³³ And admit it, at least once you’ve read a listicle like “15 Animal Vines That Will Make You Laugh Every Time” or “13 Things Every Early Cell Phone User Remembers,” or taken a quiz like “Which ‘Peanuts’ Character Is Your Kid?” If you passed along these three items, then you promoted Geico, Best Buy, or All laundry detergent, respectively.

Detecting these and other types of corporate missives online is becoming increasingly difficult. Online there are no time or space limitations, no cues to let us know that we are watching a sponsored piece of content. Demonstration videos like Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?” that show everything from marbles to magnets being whirled in a blender appear to be entertainment, not commercials. Similar demonstrations appear on blog posts or are recommended on Twitter. In their early incarnations, these might have both been legitimate endorsements. Now, however, whole industries have built up around getting bloggers and celebrities to promote products. Agencies like Izea and Ad.ly contact potential endorsers asking them to write or tweet about a product—perhaps a recipe with Tabasco or a celebrity endorsement of an insurance company—and pay them for doing so. Beauty bloggers are notorious for this practice, but it happens across a plethora of categories on sites and in social media. While these covert endorsers are legally required to say that a sponsor is paying them, the reality is that many of them do not, or they note it in the legal fine print where no one will ever read it.

In short, marketing has become about engagement, about getting us to spend increasing and inordinate amounts of time with a brand—often without our knowledge. To do that, companies create content that’s made to look like news, made to look like entertainment, made to look and feel like anything but marketing.

The question to ask yourself is this: if you knew it was an advertisement, would you give it more than a split second of your time?

Black Ops Advertising shines a light on this increasingly widespread phenomenon so that we do not waste our time with advertising that has nothing to do with us or tries to sell us a point of view without acknowledging its underlying bias. We seem to be well on our way to an advertising-augmented world where our relationships are monetized and where news is not just entertainment but also full-blown corporate puffery. How many more times will we be enticed to watch what we think is a legitimate news event, only to find out that we’ve watched an ad? I suspect more than we can guess, especially since marketers are looking to Red Bull as their “best practices” prototype. And while we are watching fake news, real newspapers continue to fold and television revenues continue to decline, which in turn has led to advertising being inserted into all manner of content both on and off line. As the blending of church and state becomes status quo, we should not be surprised to see oil companies espousing environmental benefits and food companies suggesting that processed anything is good for you—all without an advertising disclaimer in sight.

But so what? After all, advertising has long been invasive and manipulative, even flat out trickery. Most practitioners argue that these new types of advertising are an improvement over other forms because they provide benefits for consumers. In theory, after all, we should only be receiving advertising for products and services we want or need, rather than seeing unnecessary commercial clutter. It is also less intrusive than traditional marketing messages because we do not have to stop to interact with it. It occurs in the natural flow of our day. And the ability to find out about a product and buy it immediately has become as simple as hitting a button on your mobile device.

But the costs, both for consumers and for society as a whole, far outweigh these benefits. First, the traditional line between church and state (editorial content and advertising) has virtually disappeared, and with it the symbolic cues that enable us to know when we are engaging with sponsored content. Second, word-of-mouth marketing (WOM), in putting the focus on individuals and personal relationships, is creating a world where marketers try to become our friends and monetize our existing friendships. Third, as companies become adept at data

analytics, corporations control what information we see (and perhaps more importantly, what we don’t) both in terms of content and in terms of the products and services we might want to buy. Fourth, the type of content produced is being driven by the tracking and manipulation of data, and thus popularity determines what gets published and supported. Rather than scientific achievement or artistic talent or information the electorate needs to fully function in a democracy, “Likes” and tweets and followers become the currency of importance. And finally, we—all of us—are being manipulated to spend time with technology, to interact with friends, and to always be “on,” even when this is to our physical and mental detriment.

Media philosopher Neil Postman famously noted that any change in technology comes with a Faustian bargain. In explaining this rule, he said, “Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.” As we increasingly live online, we give ever more power to the players behind its workings. We have traded privacy and identity for convenience. We have traded genuine face-to-face relationships for Twitter followers and Facebook “friends.” We are lost in a corporate Neverland populated with pretty pictures and entertaining videos . . . and increasingly, we don’t even know it.