The media industry’s naughty little secret

November 25th, 2006

Leadership magazine’s fall from grace – with the revelation that you can buy an appearance on its front page – is one example of an increasingly common occurrence across our whole industry: the tendency to mislead readers about paid-for content.

It emerged in Parliament last week that the SABC had paid R123 000 to put their CEO Dali Mpofu on Leadership’s glossy cover. Appearing in this spot was once a coveted and honourable recognition of status and achievement. Now it has been debased and the magazine discredited, as it appears that it might go to the highest bidder.

It is a sad day when Leadership, once an influential publication, has fallen so low. But it is not alone in disguising paid-for material as advertising. Every day you can open newspapers and magazines which have features, supplements and surveys which are paid for – and this fact is either heavily disguised or completely hidden.

Some of my Wits colleagues – Lesley Cowling and Bate Felix, along with HSRC researcher Adrian Hadland – are about to publish a monograph which shows how widespread this phenomenon has become and makes it clear that readers are often not aware of the difference between editorial and this new kind of advertising-in-drag.

The Leadership example illustrates the danger. When you push it too far, you can damage the credibility of your product and lose far more in the long run than the income gained from a few adverts or features.

The pressure to do it is enormous, and cannot be lightly dismissed. For one thing, advertisers have become much more powerful because they have far more media choices. So they can insist that you do it, or they just take their business elsewhere.

This is what happened last week with Cell C’s new campaign. When Business Day balked at allowing Cell C to use their masthead on posters, thus giving readers the impression this was news rather than advertising, they took the business to the Mail & Guardian.

I am told that the editor of the Mail & Guardian did not know that her advertising department had sold her news posters. So it was not even that there was an ethical dilemma – it was an editorial decision (news posters have always been editorial space, written by editors) taken by advertising salespeople. (The M&G ombudsman criticized the decision and I understand that the paper has taken steps to ensure that such decisions are more carefully considered in future.)

Furthermore, television and new media is able to be much more flexible and to offer all sorts of other things (like product placement) to advertisers. So when newspapers try and make rules about these things, they are seen as fuddy-duddy and are in danger of losing even more revenue to other media sectors.

But, when people have lots of media choices to make, credibility is an all-important commodity for news and current affairs media. If the audience no longer trusts a publication’s editorial decisions, they can just go to one they trust more. Lose their trust and you lose audience, and it isn’t easy to win them back.

Sunday Time’s research, for example, has shown that their readership and sales have recovered in the last eight years or so in line with the growth in reader trust of the publication.

So the message is clear: a good publisher and good advertising manager realize that selling your soul to an advertiser is a short-term strategy which can have long term costs. A healthy publication is one which can balance the interests of readers and advertisers, or of the advertising and editorial department.

In recent years, a number of South African publications have lost this balance.

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Print