Last month, The Wall Street Journal published “Sponsor Generated Content” about the history of hedge funds to promote a new show on Showtime. In the summer, Dell’s logo showed up on a story about the future of medicine as part of Forbes “BrandVoice.” And shortly before that, a “Paid Post” for Airbnb about the history of Ellis Island appeared on The New York Times.
Are these labels all signifying the same thing? Maybe. Maybe not.
The vague definitions of native ad and sponsored content disclosures have been widely discussed over the last few years. In fact, in the fall, Contently put out a study about how well Internet users can identify the differences between native ads and purely editorial articles. The biggest takeaway: For just about every publication, readers were confused trying to separate the two types of content.
