Branding VICE (Updated)

The novel (and probably illegal) ways Vice feeds you bullshit.

(Updated March 11th 2017: I’ve added excerpts of an informative chat with a Vice insider to the part titled Branded News.)

Vice Media is a turkey, dressed as a peacock. Previous articles in this series established how their editorial department has no published code of ethics, their ‘content’ borders on fiction, the CEO repeatedly falsifies his biography (to sound cool) and the company’s circulation and demographics are smoke and mirrors to bait advertisers. So what — if anything — makes this turkey so delicious?

The shift from cool to corporate occurred in 2007 when Gavin McInnes, asshole-extraordinaire and co-founder of Vice, ‘abdicated the throne’ because editorial was being co-opted by Shane Smith — the marketing guy and current CEO.

Today, Vice is an amorphous blob occasionally dabbling in hard news. This ‘news’ frequently acts as a trojan horse for unmarked advertorials (aka: branded content / deceptive advertising / native content). A charge the CEO is intent on denying.

When Shane Smith told The Guardian he doesn’t do branded content he was, of course, too steeped in his own shit to make sense of reality. Vice has described itself as a company that does branded content in internal documents, legal filings and has won multiple awards for branded content. Alex Detrick, Vice Global Communications Director (who is difficult to reach* and only has 43 connections on LinkedIn), explained to a french publication Liberation that 90% of Vice’s revenues come from “what some call branded content”.

When Shane won AdWeek’s ‘Brand Genius award’, he told the audience that advertising celebrations “should be as big as the Emmys and the Academy awards,” and without the crowd erupting into chants of ‘hail Satan’ added “and we’re not going to stop till it happens”.

Thankfully, not everyone has been fooled. When Shane Smith took questions in an ‘Ask Me Anything’ he tried to convince people that Rupert Murdoch’s 5% buy-in gets him no influence “nothing”. One user replied saying that SEC rules require that investors be granted a ‘significant influence’ and ever since the ‘AMA’ two years ago: Shane has never returned to Reddit and James Murdoch remains on the board of Vice.

*After meeting with Gawker, NBC and the NYTimes, I sent Alex Detrick, Vice Global communications director (and former spokesperson for NY Attorney general), a short email asking if we could meet for 20 minutes. I never heard back but the e-mail made its way to Vice’s legal department who, a week later, mailed me some really fancy paper which read “To be clear, you are not to initiate any communication with VICE personnel anywhere during business hours or at any VICE place of business. These approaches cause VICE personnel to be concerned for their safety.” (Financial safety?)