S01.E13: Argentine Default and Native Advertising

[maraleia]

The line between editorial content and advertising in news media is blurrier and blurrier. That's not bullshit. It's repurposed bovine waste.

[Fremde Frau]

Nothing concrete yet, but they posted this bit on Twitter:

Tonight's show features something rare and unexpected: A brief moment of good news! Don't blink or you'll miss it!

Update:

Join us at 11 on @HBO for news about a warship from Argentina and other mysterious topics.

Edited August 3, 2014 by Fremde Frau

[dusang]

That was an oddly lackluster episode.  I have huge problems with hedge funds and the insane power they wield politically and economically.  George Soros and his hedge funds basically bankrupted the Bank of England through deliberate manipulation of the Euro -- the really scary part is that he literally had access to more money than the Bank of England.  Hedge funds and currency speculation are hugely complex and generally tedious subjects but, it he was going to cover it at all, I'm disappointed that John did such a strangely superficial job of it.

[Iguana]

With all due deference to the very serious subjects being discussed on last nights episode, can anyone tell me who the incredibly hot guy in the Coke/Ebola "commercial" was? He looked familiar…

[Sharpie66]

This episode gave me something for work. As a librarian, I have to pass on stories of interest to my company's editors, and I had somehow missed that Port Authority/Fishs Eddy dispute last week, so I was able to pass that onto our intellectual property writers this morning. Yay!

[dusang]

With all due deference to the very serious subjects being discussed on last nights episode, can anyone tell me who the incredibly hot guy in the Coke/Ebola "commercial" was? He looked familiar…

 

I loved that they spent most of the credits focusing on his abs.  That's the kind of in-depth reporting I like to see.  (Sorry, I don't know who he is.)

 

Although you remind me that I did really like the piece on "native advertising.".

[Victor the Crab]

With all due deference to the very serious subjects being discussed on last nights episode, can anyone tell me who the incredibly hot guy in the Coke/Ebola "commercial" was? He looked familiar…

 

The actor is Ryan Cooper. I only know about this because it was in the end credits next to the voice overs, because I wanted to know who did the narration for the Port Authority Bus Terminal Collectors Plate edition (I thought it was Rory Albanese using his The American voice. The answer: Colin Quinn).

 

Speaking of which, I would have thought the story about the Port Authority trying to use its muscle to put a stop to Fishs Eddy selling commemorative plates honoring the New York skyline would have been the kind of story Jon would sink his teeth into for TDS. Maybe he has something big lined up, then saw last night's LWT and screamed "DAMN YOU OLIVERRRRRRRR!!!!!"

[dusang]

The actor is Ryan Cooper. I only know about this because it was in the end credits next to the voice overs, because I wanted to know who did the narration for the Port Authority Bus Terminal Collectors Plate edition (I thought it was Rory Albanese using his The American voice. The answer: Colin Quinn).

 

Yeaaaaah, @Victor the Crab that's why you noticed his name.

 

Actually, again with the Port Authority thing -- I was just waiting for John to say something about how absurd it is for the Port Authority to claim any control of the image of an ENTIRE SKYLINE.  Much like the Argentina piece, I felt like the punch line was absent.

Edited August 4, 2014 by dusang

[roamyn]

Personally I have no problem w/hedge funds trying to recoup THEIR money by confiscating assets of the country or business that owns them.

I do not agree w/them confiscating something that could be used for the protection of the citizens.

I also don't agree w/Argentina throwing a party for a boat!

If Argentina has defaulted 7x in the modern era, you think they'd try another business model.

Was there a product being sponsored at the end? ;-)

[peeayebee]

The actor is Ryan Cooper. I only know about this because it was in the end credits next to the voice overs, because I wanted to know who did the narration for the Port Authority Bus Terminal Collectors Plate edition (I thought it was Rory Albanese using his The American voice. The answer: Colin Quinn).

Just like you, I couldn't figure out who did the voiceover, so I purposely watched all the credits to find out.

 

I was aware of native advertising, but I didn't know the name for it. I think usually recognize when a story is actually advertising before I click on it, but sometimes I get suckered in. One that I believe was native advertising was about, IIRC, underrated actors. There were actors in there I hadn't heard of. My guess is that the agent for some of these actors placed this ad to promote their clients.

 

BTW, that NYT advertising executive sounded just like Rashida Jones. She even resembled her from a distance.

 

I loved seeing that clip from Everybody Hates Chris. That was often a very funny show.

[maraleia]

In his interview with Howard Stern John mentioned trying to find a way to tell the Argentine hedge fund story so it made sense and was funny. Glad the Last Week team figured it out.

Should we change the title to the Argentine Hedge Fund story since it was the one with the longest segment?

[Athena]

Should we change the title to the Argentine Hedge Fund story since it was the one with the longest segment?

 

We can have both. It won't be too long if we amend it with both topics in the title. 

[maraleia]

Cool sounds like a great idea @Athena

[Iguana]

Thanks for the ID, Victor the Crab. I hope you didn't have to waste too much time rewinding back over that cokabola ad to find that out.

[trow125]

Here's an interview with Ryan Cooper (conducted well before his LWT appearance). He has apparently done some acting on "One Life to Live," which I'm sure helped prepare him for his role on LWT. And here's his web site, which has about a zillion photos of Ryan.

[Victor the Crab]

Thanks for the ID, Victor the Crab. I hope you didn't have to waste too much time rewinding back over that cokabola ad to find that out.

All that happened was I came across the title Voice Characters, to figure out who did the voice for the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and freeze framed it. Ryan Cooper's name was just along for the ride.

[Wax Lion]

I was aware of native advertising, but I didn't know the name for it. I think usually recognize when a story is actually advertising before I click on it, but sometimes I get suckered in. One that I believe was native advertising was about, IIRC, underrated actors. There were actors in there I hadn't heard of. My guess is that the agent for some of these actors placed this ad to promote their clients.

 

I remember a few years ago encountering a listicle about iconic fashion moments in movies. Everything in it was memorable even if you never saw the movie, but one (a green dress worn by Keira Knightly?) just made no sense with all the others. I saw it linked at another side that was similarly puzzled when one of the comments pointed out the article was sponsored by the maker of the dress. (Tho I think this was in the days before Buzzfeed and before sponsored content.)

 

Thanks, too, Victor the Crab! I was going to go back and find his name. And thanks trowl25 for his website.

[peeayebee]

I remember reading that listiicle, too.  At the time I didn't really doubt the green dress because I remembered reading about it during the movie's promotion, that the dress was very expensive and delicate and caused problems during the important sex scene in the library. But I realize that that's kind of arcane knowledge, so learning from you about the sponsorship of this listicle is enlightening.

[hertolo]

Actually, again with the Port Authority thing -- I was just waiting for John to say something about how absurd it is for the Port Authority to claim any control of the image of an ENTIRE SKYLINE.  Much like the Argentina piece, I felt like the punch line was absent.

 

I guess why state the obvious? This was the first thing on my mind as well, but if I'm thinking it while watching the segment, do they really need to go down that route when they can go down a more funny one? Not sure though that was the best segment, but I loved that voice-over. That was perfect ;)

 

And was coke the only brand Oliver didn't diss? I guess the ad made fun of it when the model splashed himself with the soda, but even that was more sexy than anything. Those abs...

 

Native Advertising (and clickbaiting) reminded me of the split going on over at a Game of Thrones fansite where the old editors left because the new giant kept on insisting on posting cocktail recipes and flooding the site with more ads. Funnily though I never noticed it myself because of ad-block* and just ignoring those obvious ad posts. Guess that is more easy in this context, just shows how scary that is. Kinda like Hedgefunds. (Whereas the shenanigans of Argentina/countries are well known to us already, the obscurity and back-dealyness of hedgefunds is scary).

 

*I do deactive adblock for any small site that I like and that I can trust to not bombard me back to the stone age with ads. I'm willing to pay for news etc. ... But in todays web, adblock is necessary for me. That reminds me. I should deactivate it for previously.tv :)

Edited August 5, 2014 by hertolo

[Wax Lion]

Speaking of Game of Thrones, clickbait was one issue I brought up to my husband. Sure, Netflix can pay to get an article about women's incarceration timed to go with the return of OINB but a lot of sites will do that for free if the show is big like OINB or Game of Thrones. Every Monday there's a flood of GoT articles, not just recaps but articles if that thing that happened to Red Viper is possible or an interview with the show's linguist.

[iMonrey]

I always appreciate the montages of cable news and morning news hosts making asses out of themselves, in this case exaggerating the potential of death over mundane things. It would be funny to see a list of all the things in that montage they were claiming can kill you.

[RadiantAerynSun]

The Native Advertising bit did make me think of entertainment articles about movies/TV shows - I do wonder how much of that is mere journalism because it's popular among readers, vs if there may be sponsorship going on...

[trow125]

The Native Advertising bit did make me think of entertainment articles about movies/TV shows - I do wonder how much of that is mere journalism because it's popular among readers, vs if there may be sponsorship going on...

 

My local paper's Sunday entertainment section is always stuffed with interviews with actors who have movies coming out (most of them quite dull since they were probably done at press junkets where they have PR people standing by to make sure nothing spontaneous or interesting gets said), or articles tied to a big movie (like a story on all the times San Francisco has gotten destroyed on film that runs the weekend before the new 'Planet of the Apes' movie is released). In that case, though, I think it's more of a quid pro quo than the "native advertising" discussed in the LWT piece -- the paper will write a lot about movies and in return, there are loads of ads from the big studios. 

 

I was glad John mentioned the Scientology ad on the Atlantic's web site, because that was done so ham-handedly that it set off a HUGE firestorm online. For a short time, there was actually a comments section attached to the story (as there are on other Atlantic stories) and I'm sure you can guess how quickly that was taken down. There's some great coverage of the event on Scientology watchdog Tony Ortega's blog, in case anybody wants to see how it was covered at the time (along with statements from The Atlantic admitting that they'd made a mistake).

[ALenore]

I'm not sure who said this, but one of the clips had someone saying something about the American people not thinking anything less of content that is influenced by advertisers.  I think that is true, but only because people have such a low opinion of both journalism and advertising, it doesn't bother them if the two are combined. 

[Fremde Frau]

The final bit with the ad was great, but overall, I don't feel that they deconstructed native advertising very effectively. I think a stronger episode would have focused less on criticizing promotional talking points (which will of course spin the church/state issue as a positive thing) and asked, instead, why we've become a society that can't be bothered to do more than a little research on our own and to think critically about the information that we ingest. It's true that we have a low opinion of journalism, but there is also a troubling tendency to trust certain voices or platforms without closer analysis. I think the strongest point was about the church/state separation and how lackadaisical the media has gotten about it, but the appearance of a thing with perfunctory disclaimers is still not the same as the thing itself written over by advertising. The disclaimers and the language used generally makes native advertising pretty easy to spot. How many disclaimers, and in what format, do we really need before it's on us to be critical readers and discern between advertising, spin, and journalism? It makes me think of how conservatives criticize TDS, TCR and now LWT as deceiving the "low information crowd" because they put on the trappings of news shows, and the answer is that they're on Comedy Central, they're comedians, etc. The disclaimers are manifest even if they're not spelled out in so many words. In fact, John could have made a really piercing point by examining labels and trust as it pertains to his own show, or to satirical shows in general.

 

Anyway, the underlying issue is just a pet peeve of mine, I guess, and I wish they'd taken it in that direction. I see all around me students at the senior university level who take a tumblr post as absolute truth that cannot be critiqued and who ask for the correct answer for exams rather than taking it on themselves to read the material critically and form their own conclusions. It reminds me of the Daily Show skit about Fox reading aloud chain emails as though they were true, and it is the same tendency whether it's conservative seniors believing Fox and talk radio, or students taking twitter and tumblr opinions as factual information, and so on and on. We're a society that has mainstreamed lazy analysis, and it drives me up the wall when both dubious practices (like native advertising) and criticisms of it or suggestions to modify it all build on the same premise that our lazy brains don't need better education but better supervision and buffer zones. Fuck that.

[Wax Lion]

@Fremde Frau, I totally agree that a little-discussed area is the need for better media literacy.

 

I also found myself disagreeing with John's conclusion that we need to buy more newspapers. For one thing, from my understanding of the industry, subscriptions and newsstand sales were never the main source of revenue, not as much as classified and legal ad sales. Sadly, a lot of that has gone away. (A rant about how newspaper conglomerates could have avoided this problem by investing in the future instead of focusing on maintaining profit margins is probably another topic.)

[possibilities]

I also found myself disagreeing with John's conclusion that we need to buy more newspapers. For one thing, from my understanding of the industry, subscriptions and newsstand sales were never the main source of revenue, not as much as classified and legal ad sales. Sadly, a lot of that has gone away.

 

I agree with your analysis of the industry, except that ad rates are driven by things like number of subscribers and newsstand sales. So even if the direct sales are not the primary direct income source, they are used to estimate how many people are seeing the ads. So buying more newspapers would drive the ad rates up and "save" the industry. The reason ads have gone away is that there are other ways to advertize that are deemed more cost-effective. But if we were all paying to look at those print ads, they'd become more valued by the advertisers, too.

[attica]

The answer: Colin Quinn).

 

Yay! I guessed right! I sometimes do, I often don't.

 

Felix Salmon should adjust his meds, I think.

Edited August 10, 2014 by attica

[dusang]

I just recently started listening to the Slate Money podcast, hosted by Felix Salmon and I just got to the episode where they reference John's piece including him.  (One of the guests quoted one of John's lines and said, basically, "that was super harsh but I would be thrilled to be mocked so hard by John Oliver" which is a respectable position to take.)  But now I can't seem to find the Argentine Default piece online -- did HBO not post it?

[OneWhoLurks]

Advertisers, ad tech companies and publishers pay heed: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released an enforcement policy Tuesday that outlines which forms of native advertising it deems acceptable and which it deems deceptive.

 

A key thread in the guidelines is that the user needs to know if content is an ad before she clicks and/or consumes content. It outlines in detail the types of placement, size, contrast and language that avoids consumer confusion.

 

[...]

 

After negative events like John Oliver’s rant against native advertising, Polar CEO Kunal Gupta sees the industry transitioning to a position of “transparency and disclosure” that will benefit native in the long term.

 

The FTC’s guidelines may help save the industry from itself. “The greatest risk the industry faces is losing trust from consumers due to lack of guidance,” Lewine said.

 

 

http://adexchanger.com/native-advertising-2/ftc-issues-native-ad-enforcement-policy-disclosure-must-precede-the-click/

[OneWhoLurks]

Quote

 

I almost felt honored when John Oliver took on the topic of native advertising on an episode of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” in 2014. I might have blushed while watching it—after all, Oliver has done amazing exposés on a variety of issues within the criminal justice system and financial industry. And now he was putting the thumbscrews to my industry—specifically a topic I’d been championing for a year or so? Aw shucks!

Yet while the native advertising bit was filled with crucial insights and some good laughs, Oliver didn’t really condemn the practice as much as suggest that it was skating on thin ice. That was a very reasonable assessment, one I echoed in a reply to the piece – because of the tectonic shifts in digital monetization practices and relative newness of native advertising, it needed some time to come into its own, particularly regarding best practices around disclosure.

But two years later, a new report from the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) would have me believe that native hasn’t grown up that much, despite some heavy guidance from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last December. In an audit of 100 top media sites, the OTA found that only 9% of native advertising surveyed met or exceeded its disclosure guidelines. Twenty percent were labeled “needs improvement” and 71% flat-out failed.

 

Native: Full Frontal Disclosure