Every week, MrConsumer searches through thousands of consumer stories trying to find the most interesting and useful ones to present to Consumer World readers.
In a Google news search last week, this story about store brands came up and I thought it might be a candidate as a “Consumer Quickie.”
Clicking through, here is the story that came up.
Use scrollbar above on right to view.
The L.A. Times story was actually kind of boring and was not put in Consumer World. But, upon closer inspection, another reason for rejecting it became apparent (yellow highlighting below added).
*MOUSE PRINT:
This is not a real story but rather an advertisement made to look like a news story. It is called “native advertising.” Under the recently adopted Native Advertising Guidelines of the FTC, this content had to be clearly labeled as a “paid advertisement” or “sponsor paid content” or similar wording. Indeed, it is so marked but is it really conspicuous enough? The “story” is so designed to look exactly like an LA Times story that one has to wonder whether two small disclosures can overcome the overall impression created by the webpage.
And why is Google indexing advertising and listing it as a news story?
We raised this exact issue two years ago with the LA Times (see original story), which at the time said:
“…the advertisement in question is clearly labeled as such and the only path for readers to find that content was intended to be via an latimes.com panel that is also clearly labeled as advertising. However, your inquiry brought our attention to the fact that although this ad and others of the same ilk is not included in our News SiteMap and the page has “noindex nofollow” directives, there appears to be a technical glitch with Google News. We are working with Google to find out why the content is indexed incorrectly and have the issue fixed as soon as possible. In the meantime, we have removed the advertisement from our site to eradicate potential for further confusion.” — V.P. Communications, Los Angeles Times
We did not recontact the LA Times, but clearly, two years later the problem still exists.
Native advertising for store brands? How does that even work? Is there a generic brand lobby or something?
Edgar replies: Wayne… the “story” was promoting a study done by the advertiser.
It is troubling that legitimate newspapers are now a conduit to deceiving consumers.
Google hasn’t done anything about it since it wants the ‘clicks’.
@HMC
“It is troubling that legitimate newspapers are now a conduit to deceiving consumers.”
Didn’t we just go through an election with this same problem? Not just advertising though.
“Didn’t we just go through an election with this same problem? Not just advertising though.”
I was going to say the same thing!!
Now Google and Facebook are adopting policies against fake news. It’s too bad they needed the kind of motivation they did to make that change.