Photograph © Matt Carr Mara Einstein is professor of media studies at Queens College, City University of New York, and an independent marketing consultant. She has been working in, or writing about, media and marketing for more than 25 years, and been an executive at NBC, MTV Networks, and at major advertising agencies. Dr. Einstein is the author of a number of books, including Compassion, Inc. (University of California Press), which examines the growing trend of promoting consumer products as a means to fund social causes and effective social change.

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

After I discovered Red Bull’s involvement, though, I felt used. Okay, so Red Bull doesn’t want to use traditional advertising. Fine. But if the content is worthy of my attention why aren’t they willing to put their name on it? The answer is easy: Red Bull is well aware that if I knew there was an advertiser involved, I—and likely 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.”[i] 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 without them realizing they are being persuaded to purchase and—the piece de resistance—get them to push the products to their friends, creating a world where we are in a constant state of buying or selling.

Whatever the label, however, it comes down to this: 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 content marketing.

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

Photograph © Matt Carr Mara Einstein is professor of media studies at Queens College, City University of New York, and an independent marketing consultant. She has been working in, or writing about, media and marketing for more than 25 years, and been an executive at NBC, MTV Networks, and at major advertising agencies. Dr. Einstein is the author of a number of books, including Compassion, Inc. (University of California Press), which examines the growing trend of promoting consumer products as a means to fund social causes and effective social change.

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

After I discovered Red Bull’s involvement, though, I felt used. Okay, so Red Bull doesn’t want to use traditional advertising. Fine. But if the content is worthy of my attention why aren’t they willing to put their name on it? The answer is easy: Red Bull is well aware that if I knew there was an advertiser involved, I—and likely 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.”[i] 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 without them realizing they are being persuaded to purchase and—the piece de resistance—get them to push the products to their friends, creating a world where we are in a constant state of buying or selling.

Whatever the label, however, it comes down to this: 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 content marketing.

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