Sponsored media posts are nothing new. Native Advertising – to give the practice its correct title – has been around for centuries. From its beginnings as newspaper advertorials (which are still very much alive and well) to celebrity tweets, sponsored content is becoming increasingly important for advertisers that know when users ignore traditional advertising.

Nicely put by The Guardian:

Native advertising can be a promoted tweet on Twitter, suggested post on Facebook or one of those full-page ads between Flipboard pages, but more commonly it is about how brands now work with online publications to reach people.

When money changes hands in order to promote a product, service or brand, it’s advertising. Whether ‘native’ or otherwise, advertising is advertising, right? Unfortunately, some advertisers and brands seems to think that a spade is a spade, except when that spade can be concealed in order to shift more product. What I’m referring to here is the huge volume of social media endorsements that go undisclosed. I’m not talking about sponsored tweets or facebook posts in the traditional sense, the ones Twitter makes you pay for, I mean the ones that ‘influencers’ post themselves.

Whether you agree with the practice or not, the rules set out by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) in the US and ASA (Advertising Standards Agency) in the UK are crystal clear – all advertising must be disclosed. So what happens when that’s not the case?

Native versus Invisible Advertising

According to general consensus, Native Advertising is advertising that is well-integrated into content (sometimes called content marketing), slightly tricking users into digesting it before realising it’s an ad, but not completely concealing the motive behind the content. You can see from the below infographic that there are several different forms of Native Advertising:

The IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) wrote a semi-useful report called “The Native Advertising Playbook“, which explains that native ads fall into 5 main categories:

In-Feed Units (those sponsored tweets you get at the top of your feed) Paid Search Units (for example, Google AdWords results) Recommendation Widgets (suggested content boxes, heavy on the click-bait headlines) Promoted Listings (external product listings, Amazon and eBay are full of them) Other (for example, the 30-second song clips you have to listen to on Spotify)

(Sidenote: IAB’s core objective is to “Fend off adverse legislation and regulation”, so ethical native advertising may not be a priority for the industry, given that IAB purportedly represents “more than 600 leading media and technology companies that are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States”.)

As you can see, Native Advertising is sponsored content. If you squint and look hard enough, you’ll see a little disclaimer such as “Sponsored by…” or “Ad” somewhere nearby to let you know. But what happens when adverts are completely hidden? This is a practice I like to call “Invisible Advertising“, and it’s happening all over the place.

What Is Invisible Advertising?

I like to think of Invisible Advertising as the mockumentary of the advertising world. A lot of us know that it’s not real, but others could be fooled into clicking/reading/purchasing something they thought was being displayed genuinely. I’m not saying that Invisible Advertising is always solely aimed at, how shall I put it, impressionable people, but it definitely doesn’t hurt to target them.

Put simply:

Invisible Advertising is sponsored content that masquerades as genuine content.

You won’t find any “sponsored by..” or “ad” disclaimers with Invisible Advertising, it’s completely integrated.

If you find it hard to believe that people will fall for Invisible Advertising, just take a look at the comments on this YouTube video called “Help Obama Kickstart World War III!” – a shocking number of people take the humourous parody at its word. Of course, not everyone online is completely gullible, but it’s possible that some of the video commenters have not even watched the video, thus demonstrating that Invisible Advertising can be highly effective in an era of short attention spans and skim-reading.

To illustrate, let’s look at the @1800flowers tweet from Justin Bieber again:

The bit.ly link in the tweet got over 100,000 clicks, most of which came on the day it was posted (May 9th 2013).

Bieber’s Mother’s Day tweet is 100% invisible advertising. “It could be genuine!” I hear you thinking! Even if you give him the benefit of the doubt, a quick look at the bit.ly link shows that it was created by a user called “sneljr30“, who also shortened a bunch of other links for 1800flowers over the course of several months. Any shred of doubt can be completely eradicated by looking at the long string of referrer info in the unshortened link: “refer.do?r=fy13scootermday&u=collection.do%3Fdataset%3D10373&cm_mmc=PTR-_-mday13-_-scooter-_-na”. Not so native now, is it?

Invisible Advertising Case Study: Lyfe Tea

Hundreds of tweets and Instagram posts (‘grams?) invisibly promote products and services every day.

Let’s look at the case of Lyfe Tea, a company that tries to sell weight loss and happiness in a simple loose leaf tea product: