How news went guerrilla marketing: a history,logic,and critique of brand journalism

Abstract

For decades, product placement and branded content have invaded more entertainment-oriented media forms; today, the rise of brand journalism (i.e. native advertising and content marketing) suggests that advertisers are now targeting news as a genre for commercial schemes. This article examines that practice through a critical analysis of advertising industry discourse including 28 in-depth interviews with brand journalism practitioners in the United States along with a decade of trade press coverage. It sketches the first historical trajectory of brand journalism and contextualizes the media industry factors that motivate participants’ exploration of it as a promotional vehicle. Drawing upon guerrilla marketing theory, this article further documents how brand journalism evinces a fundamental commercial self-effacement at its core – in mimicking journalistic style and substance – and thus portends a redefinition of advertising as a visible mass communication form.

Keywords

branding guerrilla marketing in-depth interviews journalism media production native advertising

Toward the middle of the 2010s, one Pepsi marketing executive noted of a BuzzFeed partnership, ‘What is advertising and what is content has really blurred into one’ (Rice, 2013). The observation would have been hardly remarkable for entertainment texts, which have accommodated product placement throughout their history, albeit with ever greater degrees of infestation. More problematic, however, has been the tens of billions spent on brand journalism in the last decade: a trend toward corporations employing journalistic means to engage audiences, either via news sites’ native advertising nooks or distributed through content marketing platforms and schemes. While scholarship has increasingly examined the deceptive effects of this brand journalism on readers, this project, instead, offers a critical–cultural analysis of the backstage production of that content, through in-depth interviews and trade press discourse – interrogating, specifically, the guerrilla marketing-style intentions and activities to blend promotion both in and as news genre. This article excavates the historical lineage of brand journalism and contextualizes the media industry factors influencing its production logic. Although the research focuses on brand journalism in the United States, as befitting both the highly commercialized nature of the American news media and the fact that the practice is most well-developed and lucrative there, venues ranging from England to Argentina are also taking the initiative. Ultimately, brand journalism heralds a redefinition of advertising: repositioning commercialism beyond the confines of conventional journalistic content and evading its own fundamental sales purpose in addressing audiences.

Literature review

This recent emergence of brand journalism – and the commercial self-effacement that it represents – ought to be situated against the theoretical ambitions and historical trajectory of branding broadly (Banet-Weiser, 2012; Klein, 2000). Across the arc of the 20th century, advertising both philosophically and tactically shifted away from enumerating the benefits of product attributes and engaging audiences as rational participants in the marketplace and toward David Ogilvy’s ‘soft sell’ school of industry thought (Einstein, 2017; Leiss et al., 2005). Simultaneously, branding sought to project personality upon otherwise-faceless big businesses, giving them ‘loftier’ purpose than profit alone (ambitions ostensibly echoed by later underwriting brand journalism; Marchand, 1998: 10). Such humanization remains the essence and purview of branding: anthropomorphically imbuing commercial entities (and their attendant trademarked names and logos) with recognizable social and cultural identities, ‘embody[ing] “relationships,” “values,” and “feelings”’ that help consumers locate and express their own personalities (Holt, 2004; Moor, 2007: 6).

This objective reframed the techniques of execution – a communication model for consumer engagement less as ‘stimulus-response’ and more as subtle, environmental conditioning (‘immersion and habituation’), wherein the ‘branded cultural resources’ furnished might seem ‘disinterested’ in the corporate economic imperatives that necessitate them, lest the brand come off as inauthentic (Holt, 2002: 83; Moor, 2007: 47). Adam Arvidsson (2005, 2006) further theorized that, in seeking to ‘mediate social life’ in this way, as a vessel for identity, community, and experience, the brand’s essential equity resides in the ‘ethical surplus’ generated; following Foucault, he frames this governmental posture toward the subject of its aims as providing an affective ‘ambience’ for consumer agency rather than disciplinary dictates that interpellate passivity (p. 5, 74, 93, 237).

The scale of those branding ambitions correlated with the vast expansion of media space accommodated as commercially fair game. As media technologies and environments evolved, so, too, did advertisers adapt; one common reading of digital convergence dichotomizes the disruption as interruptive ‘push’ media giving way to ‘pull’ alternatives, wherein audiences prefer to seek out content (including ad content, allegedly), rather than have it forced upon them (Spurgeon, 2008: 14). And because advertising is ‘geographically imperialistic’ in the pursuit of ‘symbolically virgin territories, away from the clutter’, it slithered into novel social and cultural spaces, often co-opting the ‘symbolic referent systems’ occupied there; indeed, the more frustrated advertisers tend to be with current conditions and traditional approaches, the more ‘camouflaged’ the innovation for selling people (McAllister, 1996: 84, 86, 105).

Prior to the past decade, that integration more often targeted pop culture – from feature films and TV shows to video games and pop music – as opposed to the non-fiction confines it will be shown practiced here (Lehu, 2007; Segrave, 2004). To be sure, those entertainment genres have also been cannibalized by corporate benefactors who seek greater creative control rather than simply sneaking in product placement. Yet, journalism has arguably been the last redoubt – among communication genres – against the forces of commercial integration and cross-promotional strategy. Public relations might try to get a corporate name – or advantageous idea – in the news (Jansen, 2017), but brand journalism represents a breakthrough in genre and practice that more or less guarantees it. The slow-motion decimation of the news industry (particularly, but not exclusively, within the United States), with subscribers, advertising, reporting jobs, and newspapers themselves vanishing, meant that journalism – as an institution – became more economically receptive to this incursion (McChesney and Pickard, 2011). To understand how those market ambitions were executed, the logic of promotional cultures from entertainment realms offers instructive insight (Davis, 2013).

More specifically, guerrilla marketing theory represents the central conceptual framework for this project. This describes a technique of commercial communication that, variously, seeps into unconventional (often noncommercial) forms, slides ‘under the radar’ of audiences, ‘self-effaces its own authority through disinterested spaces’, and ‘governs the consumer subject without that subject ever feeling the weight of such disciplinary measures’; it is, in short, advertising that tries not to seem like advertising (Serazio, 2013). And because the persuasion knowledge model holds that audience awareness of the promotional character of a message results in more ‘defensive processing’ of it, many of these new guerrilla-style branded formats are defined by an attempt to look ‘natural and “innocent”’ to avoid triggering any of that skepticism (De Pelsmacker and Neijens, 2012: 1; Wojdynski, 2016: 1476). This article critically situates such stratagems as they now target news as an advertising genre through two primary research questions:

RQ1. What is the historical evolution and media industry factors influencing the production of brand journalism?

RQ2. How does brand journalism conform to guerrilla marketing theory (in terms of both appearance and intentionality) as it infiltrates news as communication genre?

Method

In late 2017, using purposive sampling to locate relevant participants, I attempted to connect with 78 possible interviewees in the United States who are involved in the production of brand journalism via social media, e-mail contacts, or their business websites, and 28 of those agreed to participate in semi-structured conversations that took place by phone and lasted between 41 and 67 minutes (a total of 25 hours overall).¹ These interviewees came from three general groups: in-house native advertising publishing studios at journalistic outlets both legacy (e.g. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Time, and The Dallas Morning News) and new media (Gawker, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, Vice, and The Onion), content marketing ‘newsrooms’ at multinational corporations (e.g. Visa, Coca-Cola, Raytheon, Nissan, Casper, and Cisco), and those at agencies and firms brokering and consulting within the brand journalism space (e.g. Content Marketing Institute, Contently, NewsCred, Finally Content, Edelman, J. Walter Thompson, Codeword, Advance Content, and Kaleido Insights). Interviews were informed by a template of flexible, open-ended questions around advertising strategy and practice within brand journalism campaigns, particularly its historical trajectory, motivating factors, and guerrilla-style aspirations.²

To accompany these interviews, I tracked a variety of industry discourse covering brand journalism within the trade press: in Advertising Age (since subscribing in 2010), AdWeek (since 2015), and the American Press Institute’s daily e-mail listserv (since 2013); in recent trade books like Brand Journalism, Epic Content Marketing, Content: The Atomic Particle of Marketing, The End of Advertising, Native Advertising: The Essential Guide, and The Native Advertising Advantage; at a one-day ‘master class’ seminar put on by the Content Marketing Institute; and in a range of other online coverage of my interviewees’ work to prepare for our discussions (see also Serazio, forthcoming). This subsequent analysis of textual material (i.e. inductively coding interview transcripts and archival coverage) followed the ‘grounded theory approach whereby the data are carefully analyzed for emergent themes rather than applying and testing a pre-established set of categories’, allowing for ‘both descriptive and relational findings’ (Comeforo, 2017; Schauster et al., 2016). In the ensuing write-up here, I will synthesize both quoted interviewee insights with specific, detailed examples culled from trade texts in order to narrate and, later, critique the industrial history and guerrilla marketing philosophy that defines the rise of contemporary brand journalism.

Findings

Historical context

The story of brand journalism well predates the digital disruptions that supposedly necessitated its proliferation of late. Within trade lore, John Deere’s The Furrow magazine is often cited as the earliest forbearer of form, developed at the dawn of the 20th century and purported to be editorially oriented to cover ‘topics that farmers cared about deeply’ rather than stuffed with ‘self-serving content’ (Pulizzi, 2014: 15). From the start, then, brand journalism has fashioned itself, outwardly at least, as obfuscating the imperatives of its corporate benefactor in favor of the (supposedly) objective service of its readership. Other older examples include a 1920s Sears-backed radio program that similarly covered economic news germane to farmers and NBC’s 1950s Camel News Caravan, which inaugurated the use of filmed news stories. Meanwhile, in newspapers, advertorials had long taken hold (also termed ‘puffs’ or ‘reading notices’ in earlier decades), written to propagandize on behalf of special interests, or hype products but ‘often disguising the advertisement by focusing on prominent people and other unrelated information, and then mixing in plugs and “news” about the advertiser’s [products]’ in ways that clearly foreshadow today’s brand journalism innovations (Baker, 1994: 50; Coddington, 2015: 75).

Etymologically, the label, ‘brand journalism’, appears to have originated in the early years of the 21st century, perhaps from a McDonalds’ chief marketing officer (CMO) who declared that ‘mass marketing no longer worked’ (an odd admission from a global monolith whose scale would preclude survival without it) and that, instead, ‘we should think of a brand as we think of a magazine [or] fat multi-section Sunday newspapers’, with brand journalism offering a wide range of content to a wide range of audiences and expressing the (apparent) ‘multidimensional essence’ of a multinational corporation (Bull, 2013: 9, 13). Brand journalism is, however, far from exclusive as a label used within the industry to refer to these professional practices; rather, I find it is the most efficient categorization of two related terms – native advertising and content marketing – that can be briefly disaggregated and historicized here as well.

Native advertising seems to have been coined, fittingly, by a venture capitalist encouraging new media companies to monetize their textual inventory ‘in a way that’s native to their platform’ (the semiotic significance of this specific word will be deconstructed later in this article; Smith, 2017: 4). The industry pioneer most often associated with native advertising’s development is Forbes executive Lewis D’Vorkin who, in 2010, inaugurated Ad/Slant, offering brands the chance to buy and write sponsored blogs hosted (and ‘thinly disguised’ from editorial) on the news platform; competitors like The New York Times and The Washington Post would later pluck off Forbes talent for their own native initiatives (Coddington, 2015: 75). These early experiments with native betrayed an agnosticism about any pretense of the division between ‘church and state’ (i.e. news and advertising) that was, to practitioners, technologically obsolete: ‘The idea was that there was one container of content and everybody used the same container’, explained one Forbes alum (Smith, 2017: 35). In other words, in the migration of media content from print to online spaces, convergence obliterated both formats and norms for content partition: everything – news, ads, news-like ads – would (or should) pool together there.

Equally influential as an institution spreading native practices, BuzzFeed concluded that contemporary advertising needed to look to television’s early branded content days for business model inspiration: ‘When the advertising is content . . . that’s the future for publishers’, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jonah Peretti emblematically forecast (Einstein, 2016: v; Rice, 2013). The start-up knew it had to monetize site popularity toward profitability but did not want banner ad ‘obstruction’ to diminish user experience; hence, the less ‘interruptive’ native partnership format blended in with its signature listicle content style. Other widely cited case studies of native success within industry discourse include, financially, Vice stabilizing the entire company off the format (particularly, one lucrative partnership with Intel) and, editorially, The New York Times T Brand Studio’s lauded Netflix-sponsored investigative deep dive into women’s prisons. A 2013 scandal wherein The Atlantic featured Church of Scientology propaganda did little to douse the interest and spread of native to other online newspapers and magazines in the years since; one oft-hyped Business Insider valuation had the US market pegged north of US$20 billion by decade’s end.

Meanwhile, as traditional journalistic publishers – with, theoretically, more objective integrity to lose – were testing out those native brand partnerships, corporations themselves also ambitiously and directly plunged into this quasi-news space in what would become known as content marketing. Here, interviewees and industry discourse reverentially recounted, variously, Red Bull’s ‘Media House’ lifestyle content factory, American Express’s ‘OPEN Forum’ business news network, Chipotle’s Farmed and Dangerous anti-agribusiness miniseries, GE Theater’s multimillion-downloaded podcast, The Message, and Kraft’s Food & Family magazine paying subscribers as inspiring other Fortune 500 companies to explore and initiate similar media production. Notably – given the seismic promotional budget it wields and how that allocation influences other media institutions and professionals financially downstream – Coca-Cola built out a newsroom team and converted its corporate website, for a time, into a more journalistic format for reporting, blogging, and ‘long-form narrative’ content (Spayd, 2014).

To be clear, the distinctions between native advertising and content marketing largely have to do with whether a news company (the former) or a traditionally non-media corporation (the latter) is hosting or distributing that advertorial; beyond that, though, the ambition and execution is virtually indistinguishable, which is why brand journalism, as a label, effectively subsumes both streams of professional work. (That said, some practitioners occasionally recoiled in my interviews at being grouped together with the activities of, as I have explained, analogous counterparts.)

Having narrated this brief history of the genre, it’s also worth examining what factors interviewees and the trade press identified as formative; for the stories told about commercial conditions tend to, allegedly, ‘naturally’ justify the ensuing guerrilla methods piloted. Unsurprisingly, given its role as a culprit in so much cultural and professional upheaval, technological change came most to the forefront in terms of the opportunity for and necessity of brand journalism (Serazio, forthcoming). More specifically, technology has capacitated audiences to avoid traditional forms of advertising through blockers, filters, recorders, and streaming and therefore diminished the efficacy of typical interruptive interventions. As the head of global marketing for Vice noted, viewers’ ‘visceral intolerance’ to ‘intrusive’ display and pre-roll formats hopelessly dwindled click-through rates and depressed cost-per-thousand impressions metrics. Online banners are especially denigrated by these ad-dollar competitors as a symbolic of an impotent vehicle of marketing power (and thus framing brand journalism as the supposedly logical recourse); an apparently pervasive industry cliché holds that you have better odds of surviving a plane crash as successfully convincing a website visitor to click on a display ad. Moreover, those lofty brand-building ambitions identified in the literature review tend to be hindered by the visual and temporal scale of stock Internet inventory; it is, in other words, hard to humanize a corporate entity when audiences instinctively evade the already-insufficient vessel for that anthropomorphization program. Nevertheless, digital ad spending has grown inexorably year over year (overwhelmingly redounding to Facebook and Google’s benefit), so brand journalism came to represent a bespoke alternative.

Yet, banner blindness is not the only justification invoked by evangelizers here; brand journalism is also driven by an industry narrative that social networking sites and self-publishing formats like blogging now afford an opportunity for every corporation to be its own media company, without having to hurdle over the content production and distribution impediments of yesteryear. Because, as one interviewee rationalized, search and social ‘requires content’ as grist for the daily digital mill, this invites brand journalism contributions. Better still (for practitioners) is the assumption that audiences often ‘can’t actually recall the source’ of the vast majority of content they encounter online, especially in newsfeeds, which means that The New York Times and Coca-Cola alike – not to mention T Brand Studio’s native output for Coke – have equal ‘latitude’ for engaging attentiveness and achieving ‘trustworthiness’ for their content output, even as one, theoretically, has designs on enlightening citizens within the public sphere and the other lightening a consumer’s wallet.

Indeed, the Internet has long wreaked havoc in flattening information hierarchies and destabilizing traditional gatekeepers; we see here how it heartens brand competitors as the playing field for journalistic content – not to mention this quasi-journalistic (i.e. advertorial) content – has been leveled. The growth of Facebook and Twitter, early dependents on native, and Google AdWords, another harbinger of commercial indigenization, heralded much of this industrial momentum; with audiences being ‘trained’ to consume information in formats that blurred boundaries which had separately and distinctively designated advertising, news venues would follow suit.

Going guerrilla in/as journalism

The intrinsic theoretical premise of guerrilla marketing is, as the Che Guevarian neologism implies, camouflaging promotional content outside clearly circumscribed commercial contexts (Serazio, 2013). This stealthy strategy – and underlying ethos – has been deployed by and undergirds a variety of tactics, firms, and brands found in entertainment texts, interpersonal opportunities (i.e. word-of-mouth), and social media platforms. The evidence from this research inquiry confirms that the ‘mimicry’ of guerrilla mentality now informs brand journalism as well, a space especially enticing for its historically ‘objective’ sheen (Borchers, 2017: 200). David Ogilvy himself augured this philosophy when he recommended, ‘The less an advertisement looks like an advertisement and the more it looks like editorial, the more readers stop, look, and read’ (Laursen and Stone, 2016). Decades later, an Economist executive echoed this advice that publishers should rethink their mandate toward agency-like ends: ‘The real issue is how do you make content that’s compelling to a reader that doesn’t feel like an ad’ (Wasserman, 2013a).

Tellingly, the label ‘native’ itself has an unmistakable guerrilla quality to it – implying preference for blending in with the local population (metaphorically rendered here as the news content) rather than protruding outward as an otherwise alien interloper, so as to not betray its true communicative purpose (i.e. selling goods). That is quite specifically touted as native’s alluring ‘magic’ – that it does not ‘get relegated to the corner of the page, and therefore perceived as a foreign object’ (Smith, 2017: 10). An array of industry discourse hypes precisely this guerrilla ambition: the Interactive Advertising Bureau trade group (‘aspire to deliver paid ads that are so cohesive with the page content, assimilated into the design, and consistent with the platform behavior that the viewer simply feels they belong’; The native advertising playbook, 2013), The New Yorker’s branded content director (who emphasizes ‘we attempt to make it very seamless into the publication’), and The New York Times and Huffington Post native creative veteran Melanie Deziel:

If the content is going to live on your site, you want it to fit in. You want it to be similar to what your audience tells you they visit you for and similar to what they tell you they trust you for.

The development of in-house native studios at media companies over the past decade is further evidence of that effort to teach brand clients how to borrow from and blend into the editorial side. Likewise, through the articles concocted, corporate brands are advised by consultancies like NewsCred (note the emblematic name) to

build a digital experience that looks exactly like an [editorial] publisher, because you don’t want [audiences] landing on your website thinking that they’re there to be sold a product. The only way to do that is to create and to mirror exactly publisher-like experiences. (Sebastian, 2013)

This is, of course, meant to deliberately blur ‘the traditional “church/state” divide of editorial vs advertising, which is what makes native advertising so effective’, as one textbook nakedly enthuses (Smith, 2017: xii). Reworking US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous invocation on obscenity, an interviewee wryly quipped, ‘Native advertising is not like porn: If it’s done well, people don’t know it when they see it’ (Wasserman, 2013b). To achieve that essential invisibility, ‘context’ becomes the most critical factor in crafting brand journalism – both in terms of form and function. I analyze first how and why stylistic considerations are deemed important to embedding guerrilla marketing in and as journalism before turning to the necessary substantive stratagems for mirroring news content.

Examples of the former in practice are rife: The Washington Post shared its editorial publishing platform with its brand studio to facilitate ease and similarity of article design and reader targeting technology; The New Yorker rolled out a ‘Goings On Out of Town’ branded product for a Canadian tourism client (‘bouncing back off editorial and especially with sections or the content they put out – that resonates really well’, an interviewee boasted); BuzzFeed was ‘able to pretty much adopt’, commercially, any successful formats it saw as trending on the editorial side; and the T Brand Studio maintained its ‘Mr. and Mrs.’ name honorifics to match the ‘visual DNA’ of the The New York Times’ decorum (Benton, 2014).

For practitioners, brand journalism should not just look like its ‘real’ counterparts in terms of headlines and formatting; the industry discourse suggests that it also craves achieving editorial equilibrium of substance (Serazio, forthcoming). ‘If it’s not aping the editorial standards of the platform it’s on, then it’s probably not going to work’, one participant summarized. For example, when Gawker ran its first native post written by Samsung in ‘just the driest PR copy you’ve ever read’, they apparently got e-mails and comments rejecting that style; subsequently, when it rolled out a full branded Gawker blog on behalf of Jaguar, the content studio head instructed the lead writer to adhere to the snarky irreverence that had defined the site tonally (i.e. telling him ‘here’s how the voice should sound’). For Jaguar’s message to therefore succeed, it had to become more Gawker-esque.

Similarly, Jim Gaines of The Atlantic’s native team hoped his branded journalism copy sounded ‘smart and in the voice of an intelligent person speaking to another intelligent person, not talking down to anybody and not oversimplifying’, just as the magazine has sought for 150 years: ‘I always thought my job was to make it as close to Atlantic quality as possible’, he says. Other venerable news institutions have literally traded on their reputations in much the same fashion. The Washington Post’s brand studio, for instance, sells its ‘award-winning investigative lens’ and ‘chops’ to advertiser clients. Katie Manderfield, director of content strategy for the Times native shop, sought to maintain the same level of fact-checking ‘rigor’ and holistic orientation as informed the editorial side:

One of the missions of The New York Times is to help provide meaning in people’s lives and to help make people understand the world. I think that’s the same type of thing we’re looking for [in] branded content: . . . get utility to readers as much as we can, help people understand the world a bit better using the expertise that a brand might have.

Commercial self-effacement

The brand journalism ideal of eliding the inherent transactional intent – at least as compared to traditional advertising – was echoed almost universally in interviews and is described here by the (former Pulitzer Prize winning) content marketing head at one defense contractor:

I would hope that the content that’s being put out there is a little more journalistic – not only in its methods, but also its tone, because at the end of the day, you don’t want to be doing a hard sale. You don’t want to be using the heavy marketing words and thumping your chest. You want people to be taking these messages and coming over to your way of thinking and the way to do that is by presenting the information clearly and honestly.

Thus, according to industry discourse, branded news content needs to, variously, ‘sell without selling’, ‘communicate a brand’s ideals without . . . explicit messaging’, and not ‘feel like an ad’ that will ‘hit them over the head with a specific call to action’ (Bull, 2013: 2). At times, one interviewee explains, that takes some hand-holding ‘guided by the publication to [teach clients to be] more journalistic and less-salesy’, and outright cautioning them, ‘if you want to say, “click here, buy now,” this [format] is not for you’. Melissa Rosenthal, who helped pioneer the genre for BuzzFeed, acknowledged that such conversations had to happen almost daily in the company’s early years:

[Clients] all wanted to see themselves in it to the point where it would be watered down and you just have to say, ‘Listen, you purchased this . . . If you want this content to be shared and . . . perform, we need to make sure that it seems very editorial and that there’s a narrative and it isn’t just an ad placement’.

Indeed, the repetitiousness of that negotiation led to the development of ‘BuzzFeed University’, a set of classes the company offered brands to understand journalistic content creation as opposed to a ‘traditional ad buy’. The vice president of one native studio further explains, ‘What [our readers] don’t want to see is an ad. What they want to see is a brand integrated into [our publication] in a way that is authentic to what [our publication] does well’. Indeed, it is not only audiences that (allegedly) recoil from the overtness of traditional advertising form; brand journalism producers themselves are equally averse to even using the term, advertising, to describe their work. Forbes, for example, changed the name of its seminal native product from ‘AdVoice’ to ‘BrandVoice’, because the former ‘conveyed the notion that it was part of the advertising mix’, while the latter better framed ‘this is about content and thought leadership’ (Thornton, 2013). The basis for these showy claims of commercial self-effacement resides in the fact that there is usually no emphatic ‘buy this!’ petition embedded within content. Thus, brand journalism’s sales obfuscation – like guerrilla marketing more broadly – represents a different way of speaking to audience ‘subjects’ and therefore a different mode of conceptualizing advertiser power. In order to undersell the ultimate objectives of the content (i.e. moving product), the tone of speech needs to come across as less ‘heavy-handed’ about its intent – less like ‘state television’ or ‘voice-of-god’ narration, as one interviewee put it (Bull, 2013: 58).

Recalling the theoretical backdrop here, ‘display advertising said, “hey, look over here!”’ – a forceful, interruptive, ‘jam [it] down the throat of a consumer’ approach that one publisher likes to contrast with native effectively working ‘with the freedom of consumers’ and ‘go[ing] with the flow’ of the content sought out rather than inflicted upon (Arvidsson, 2006: 8; Smith, 2017: 31, 40). In governmental terms, this is a turnabout from dictating passivity to assuming and accommodating audience agency. The hardest projects to therefore work on, one industry veteran explains, are ‘conversion-based campaigns’ where the outcome is specific and concrete (e.g. selling tickets, initiating sign-ups, etc.): ‘Because in order for [those] to work, there has be a hard call to action and that is one of the least organic things in a journalism context. We are not used to telling people, “Go do something”’. Most journalism is, moreover, especially professionally ill-suited for that ‘something’ to be specifically purchase-oriented, which is what advertising fundamentally must (eventually) demand of subjects. This makes for considerable irony worth restating clearly: the toughest brand journalism initiatives to manage are those that actually attempt to sell something.

No less critical here is again bearing in mind the necessities and opportunities afforded by today’s digital media ecology. As one interviewee likes to remind his clients, the reason to avoid producing obviously promotional (and thus crassly commercial) content is because that content, more or less, has to compete with everything else on the Internet for attention; rare is it that an advertisement will stop a scroll through the informational and entertainment deluge of online sites and social feeds. This obliges transforming the ad pitch into journalistic genre, yet because audiences are assumed to approach news with a different desire and mind-set (not ‘direct response buying mode’) – and theoretically unencumbered by the persuasion knowledge model – the content cannot converse with them in such forced fashion.

Social spread-ability – itself heavily dependent on the absence of a palpable pitch – is equally relevant to the elusive aspirations of brand journalism producers: ‘The question we asked ourselves constantly [at Coke Journey] was, “Would you share this? Would your aunt or uncle share this on Facebook?”’ an executive explained. Search also informs brand journalism production, as much content was often crafted to score high on Google page rankings (i.e. landing articles – especially resource-oriented articles – as the answers to common query or word-strings); this, too, required for that output to not seem ad-like, which apparently does not get indexed and spidered in the same way that ‘real’ news does. ‘You need it to look natural and happenstance that this [content] delivers you the audience to [the client], because they were looking for something else’, one interviewee explained of his circuitous search engine optimization schemes.

In obfuscating any explicit call to consumer action, the specific brand or product should also itself, ideally, be marginalized within content: ‘The best native advertising’, one interviewee paradoxically declared, and ‘doesn’t even mention the advertiser’ in it. The brand insertion motto at the Times’ native shop was apparently: ‘Only as many times as necessary [and] only as large as necessary’. Those efforts to ‘not come at it head-on with really just product placement’, as the storytelling head for The Washington Post’s native studio advocated, sound particularly similar to the aspirations and negotiations that have long taken place in more fictionalized and entertainment-oriented branded media content over the years, albeit now relocated to a journalistic setting (Serazio, 2013). Stephanie Losee, content head at Visa, detailed an example of this approach with the Economist-worthy ‘Cashless Cities’ report her team helped produce: ‘It does make points about the role of digital payments in moving cities forward. But I don’t have to say anything about any Visa products’, she said (and, indeed, there are but two sponsor mentions in the 68 pages of ‘news’ content). ‘When I’m creating this piece, I create it using our brand guidelines and our colors and our look and feel . . . And, yet, it serves a useful purpose independent of the fact that, at Visa, we commissioned it’.

What, then, does brand journalism want, if not explicitly selling products – the endgame without which it could not even afford to exist in the first place? Above all, brand journalism seems to seek to engage audiences atop ‘the funnel’, in marketing parlance: not pitching directly but inaugurating the customer journey by establishing a corporate relationship and vaguely warm feelings about the benefactor providing intellectually advantageous content. Brand journalism is, in other words, playing the long con: it is ‘circuitous power’, in that takes a ‘tortuous approach to conducting conduct’ by obscuring the intentions of the sponsor that makes the messaging possible (Serazio, 2013: 140).

Casper’s Van Winkle’s sleep journalism vertical gambit offered instructive insight into this market logic: the site, which had only a subtle ‘Published By’ indication of the mattress backer in the webpage footer (this impression of autonomy made getting sources for interviews and audiences for that content easier, too), was meant to get people thinking and talking more, in general, about sleep. ‘That was my job’, explained editor-in-chief Jeff Koyen, ‘and then it was Casper’s job to deliver the advertisement on the way home on the subway’, and ‘they flooded the zone online, [and] in real life, with advertising messages that would convert you at the right moment’. In other words, theoretically, the corporation hoped (like others in their respective market categories) if you read more about sleep, you will care more about the subject and, eventually, spend more on it, too.

Conclusion

For several decades now, reports of the ‘death’ of advertising have persisted and been greatly exaggerated; one recent review of the field notes how the term itself, understood as something textually discrete from non-advertising content, may soon be obsolete (West and McAllister, 2013). This research confirms that trendline. What has been documented and analyzed is not so much a demise as another mutation: a fundamental reconsideration of the texture and objective of advertising as mediated communication form. In turn, much of the industry discourse examined in this inquiry found robust debate over what, exactly, to call this nascent, hybrid genre. Even in the absence of a universally accepted taxonomy, the characteristics that inform and exemplify brand journalism crop up consistently: chiefly, the content borrowing the style and mimicking the function of the host institution or news genre in addressing audiences that opt into the promotional experience rather than being disruptively interrupted by it. While this article has focused on the practice in a US context – and that likely remains the largest market for it – the trend can nonetheless be tracked worldwide. One recent report from the Native Advertising Institute, a Copenhagen-based trade group, charts brand studio representatives from The Irish Times, Germany’s Bild, Croatia’s Hanza Media, and Sweden’s Helsingborgs Dagblad navigating many of the same dynamics, growth, and challenges spotlighted here – from organizational coordination to content format to murky labeling (Laursen, 2017).

Clearly, ‘brand journalism’, as a label, does not capture all forms of native advertising (like paid search, promoted listings, etc.), and it is similarly but a smaller swath of content marketing (accounting for less than its entertainment world counterparts); these two subcategories or synonyms might further be distinguished by whether the brand is renting the media space (native advertising) or owns it (content marketing). Moreover, considerations of the visibility – or lack thereof – remain essential here: when academic experts proffered a new definition for advertising at the turn of the century (‘paid, mediated form of communication from an identifiable source, designed to persuade the receiver to take some action’), it failed to account for the self-effacement of patronage and purpose that guerrilla marketing, generally, and brand journalism, specifically, now evince (Serazio, 2013: 154). Corroborating other studies that showed confusion in perceiving brand journalism correctly as advertising, one experiment found that less than 1 in 10 participants recognized a sponsored article as such (Wojdynski and Evans, 2016). By talking to brand journalism producers about the genealogy, impetus, and deliberate ambiguity of their textual output, this article has confirmed how those cunning outcomes are precisely the intent.

Indeed, there is notable irony that advertising’s death is often declared during the same era when audiences have seen a relentless encroachment of its march into all walks of life and culture; textual borders and professional norms that once sealed off spaces as exclusionary of commercial messaging have proven porous. That guerrilla infiltration of entertainment and social media might be exasperating, but the stakes seem lower when it is merely a reality TV show overstuffed with product placement or an Instagram influencer shilling for a brand backer. Journalism was always equally enticing territory precisely for its seriousness of purpose in purporting to construct non-fiction reality; it obviously often fell short of ideals of independence and objectivity – and an entire profession, public relations, is partly predicated on breaching that integrity. It is, however, not naïve of long-standing political-economic realities to cling to the hope that news might exist for something more democratically necessary than just selling you products.

As framed earlier, the ambitions of branding are neither modest nor oriented toward rationality among the subjects addressed and products pitched. News – as communication genre and professional practice – is merely another spatial dimension within which to situate marketplace imperatives. But, again, as guerrilla marketing theory portends, the persuasive impetus – that effort to guide consumer choice – cannot be explicitly rendered, both because of the legacy of genre conventions (i.e. news, historically, was not supposed to look like an ad pitch) and the fact that consumers tend to shirk at being governed in that ‘hard sell’ fashion.

This begets the deceptiveness explored in the preceding pages: interviewees and trade press discourse offer examples of promotional content mimicking journalistic format and substance. Even the label for one of brand journalism’s two primary subcategories – ‘native’ advertising – openly betrays the intent to hide commercial tactics among that which seems like more ‘natural’ editorial content. By interviewing professionals involved in its creation and consulting coverage of its ascendance, those production-side efforts to mirror news in deliberately murky ways become empirically clearer. This fits within that longer trajectory of branding logic and strategy that avoids shilling for products directly in favor of constructing an affective ambience around them and humanizing the affiliated corporate presence. For decades, various forms of fictionalized content represented the forefront of these machinations; the news genre, it seems, is now the new cover and means to achieve those camouflaged ends.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Michael Serazio

Notes

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