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