Expect To See More Ads Pretending To Be Editorial Content

This lovely story — which grossly overestimates my affection for kale — is currently sitting at the top of the Buzzfeed homepage. Expect to me 34% more of this kind of crap in the coming year… You were warned.

At the same time as Google is looking to give some sites a way to make money by not running ads, advertisers are ramping up their spending on ads that look like editorial content and can’t be avoided with any ad-blocking plugin.

We’ve written before about the prevalence of so-called “native” advertising — sponsored articles dressed up to look like it is part of the editorial content of the site you’re reading — and the many ways in which sites disclose (or obscure) that the story is bought and paid for.

But in spite of the fact that consumers don’t need another listicle (paid for by Naked Juice) about the benefits of chia seeds, or posed photos of a food website’s editor showing off the latest Gap clothing, or advice from Converse on how to be more creative, AdAge reports that many of the country’s biggest advertisers, including GE and Ford, plan to increase the amount of money they spend on this nonsense.

In all, advertisers are expected to spend $4.3 billion (yes, that’s a “b”) in 2015 on native advertising, a 34% increase over the amount wasted this year on stories written by Boeing about submarines and Toyota-sponsored lists about people who “Elevated Their Transportation Game,” which are four words that vaguely sound like they might mean something when strung together.

To make it easier to shoehorn in this alien content, advertisers are even paying for some sites’ editorial staffs to create these story-length ads.

But these advertisers might be tossing billions of dollars into the abyss as native advertising poses a huge risk with the chance of little reward.

Unlike traditional advertising, which tries to get as many eyeballs on an ad as possible, native advertising is usually very targeted to a specific audience. GE can run the same dishwasher ad on countless sites, but it can only choose one or two places to post its advertorial quiz. If that fails, the campaign is sunk.

Which is why so many of these native ads use clickbait headlines and appear on sites that every friend of yours from high school can’t stop linking to on Facebook. Not only does this increase the odds of the ad being shared, but as we recently pointed out, it also further obscures the fact that the content is sponsored.

Native advertising also gets around plugins that block online ads from being served up on web pages, so while all those banners, GIFs, and videos in a site’s sidebars might be stopped by your plugin, you’ll still be faced with some story about Depends from Kimberly-Clark.

That said, some folks, including my colleague Laura, say that the Ad Detector plugin for Firefox and Chrome does do a decent job of flagging these sponsored stories so that you don’t waste your time clicking on them.