The world seems increasingly cluttered with noise and visual stimulation as marketers vie for your attention. Take a walk through Times Square if you want evidence of this fact. One is accosted by at least a dozen people shoving flyers at you in the span of a few blocks, while you drown in a sea of flashing light and color from the 3,000 square foot billboard signs that cover every building.
We all know that advertising is essential for building brand awareness and communicating product information, and when done well, is appreciated by consumers. However, the danger of the overly-aggressive “Times Square Assault” method is that as too many messages become too loud and intrusive, the audience may develop filters to ignore advertising altogether. Email spam filters spring to mind.
It’s no wonder that there is a movement toward the more subtle marketing approach of sponsored content. The idea is that advertising messages are made to appear as editorial content so they will more likely get through the audience’s filters. In many instances, just how closely sponsored content resembles editorial is managed by the editorial staff.
Flirting with the line that divides ads and editorial can have its pitfalls. It doesn’t take long for audiences to learn to recognize these messages for what they are: advertising disguised as news. And if the editorial integrity of a magazine or website is compromised, readers will no longer trust the publisher and may choose to cut out that channel altogether.
However, there are methods of content marketing that can effectively engage audiences while still maintaining editorial integrity.
Take, for example, Insurance Journal’s How-To-Write podcast series. These podcasts feature industry experts discussing market basics in an interview format, but it’s not disguised as official editorial. The clearly-labeled sponsoring company is merely using our website as a powerful platform to educate their target audience about various difficult-to-understand products which require more than a sound bite. The marketer is providing useful information to the P&C industry while simultaneously raising brand awareness and establishing their own expertise.
The key is for marketers to use the publisher’s platform to provide their own content of value—that’s the way sponsored content should be done.
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