CNN’s ‘Courageous’ Advertorial Mill
By Jim Naureckas
June 10, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "FAIR"
- CNN
has announced the formation of a new unit that will not report the news.
Instead, it will take money from corporations to produce content that resembles
news but is actually PR designed to burnish its clients’ images.
The name CNN gives to this mercenary enterprise?
“Courageous.”
CNN
hopes its “trustworthiness” will get corporations to pay it
to make “news-like content” that will “tell advertisers’
stories.” (CNN screen grab:
Daily Buzz)
|
It’s hard to see what’s particularly courageous about
CNN‘s move, even if you see the destruction of journalistic boundaries
as a heroic struggle. As a report about CNN‘s foray into
“news-like content on behalf of advertisers” on a Wall Street Journal
marketing blog (6/8/15)
notes, “news companies from the New York Times to
BuzzFeed to the Wall Street Journal have units that
create advertiser content.”
Perhaps CNN anticipates courageously
withstanding ethical criticism. As the Journal‘s Steven
Perlberg notes, “These undertakings often raise church-and-state questions about
the divide between the editorial and business sides of a
company”–understandably, since the point of so-called native advertising is to
create advertising vehicles “that feel like editorial work.”
But CNN‘s parent company insists that this is
not about fooling consumers:
“This isn’t about confusing editorial with advertising,”
said Dan Riess, executive vice president of integrated marketing and branded
content at Turner. “This is about telling advertisers’
stories — telling similar stories but clearly labeling that and
differentiating that.”
Mr. Riess said CNN’s trustworthiness when
it comes to news was part of the reason Courageous would be attractive to
advertisers.
“This is CNN. We’re not here to blur the
lines,” he said.
So advertisers will come to Courageous because CNN‘s
“trustworthiness” and unwillingness to “blur the lines” will be transfered by
viewers to advertising content that is “similar” to CNN‘s news
but “clearly label[ed] and differentiat[ed].” This is a business strategy, of
course, that only works if the similarity outweighs the differentiation.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.
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Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
