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Watch out for ads in disguise

5 min read

Several years back, when I taught rhetoric to college freshman, we would spend part of the semester dissecting advertisements. I’d bring in a bunch of ads in various formats from different decades, and we would spend a half hour or more breaking down each ad to see how they worked.

We looked at words, images, the target audience, the message, the ad’s context in place and time…even tiny details like the subtle wrinkle of a model’s clothes, which led to a long discussion of what that deliberate dishevelment meant.

My students were very, very good at analyzing ads. They’d grown up in a world steeped in advertisements, and they could read the language of a sale.

Eventually, they would choose an ad on their own and write an essay about it, using the tools of dissection we’d practiced. Inevitably, many of them would begin their essays with a version of this message: “In today’s society, ads are everywhere.” And though the phrase started to grate after the 80th paper with the same opener, my students were not wrong. And they’re more right all the time.

Ads are everywhere.

Now, seven years later, advertisement saturation in our lives is greater than ever before. And the ads of today don’t look or feel like ads at all; they blend in with all the other daily media we consume.

We’d grown tired of the deliberate sell. It was too obvious. We started flipping channels during commercials, clicking away from ads online, throwing away our junk mail. Now, we want to get something out of not just the product being advertised, but the very advertisement itself.

And so, all a company like Friskies needs to do is create a cute and compelling cat video with high production values, pay the popular online media site BuzzFeed to post it to their YouTube channel, and watch as their own target customers spread the ad like wildfire to other target customers.

Then there’s sponsored content. That is, ad copy that is deliberately designed to match the format, tone and style of the publication or website in which it appears.

Usually, a logo or message in a small font appears at the top identifying the copy as “Sponsored Content,” but it can go unnoticed if you’re not looking for it.

The other day, I was surprised by an instance of locally relevant sponsored content-the reason I’m writing this column. Browsing the website for The Atlantic, a somewhat snobbish, intellectual, liberal leaning magazine, I saw a photo with the headline “The Appalachian Revival in Connellsville, Pennsylvania: How New Energy is Transforming America’s Heartland.”

Of course, I clicked.

Then, another headline at the top of the article, “Tuffy and the Comeback of the Coal Capital of the World.”

The article that follows is very well-written, done in a first-person point of view, much like any other piece of high-quality journalism you’d find in The Atlantic. There are great quotes from a local businessman you might even know: Tuffy Shallenberger of Shallenberger Construction in Connellsville, which the writer of the piece quaintly calls “a blue-collar nook” surrounded by “majestic forest.”

“Without the gas right here right now, I don’t know what we would be doing. It’s that simple,” said Shallenberger.

That’s when I realized something fishy was going on. I looked at the top of the article and saw the small line, “Sponsored Content,” next to a Chevron logo.

Then, I read the article through different eyes, noticing the key differences between this article and a real piece of journalism. It was subtle, but the whole piece was actually a long-form advertisement for Chevron, with well-placed descriptors of Connellsville as a struggling former boomtown now experiencing a tremendous resurgence…thanks, of course, to natural gas.

“As a result [of natural gas], the median household income in Connellsville’s Fayette County has ballooned nearly 42 percent from $27,451 in 2000 to $38,903 last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.”

Missing from these impressive numbers, of course, is that the Fayette County per capita falls short of the PA state average of $52,267 by almost $13,000. And that the “Texas-based energy workers [planting] their roots in the region” are actually driving up the cost of rent in Fayette County. For some in Fayette County, natural gas has been a boon. A big one. But a true piece of journalism would have explored the complexities of the situation.

To be clear, this column is not an argument against natural gas in our region, which remains a very complicated issue whose affects we won’t really know or understand for a long time.

It’s simply to show that ads, as we know them, are changing into something a bit more sinister, and it’s in our best interest-in Fayette county and everywhere-to keep our critical thinking skills as sharp as my former students,’ and be on the look out for advertisements disguising themselves as an objective truth.

Jessica Vozel is originally from Perryopolis and, after attending graduate school and teaching in Ohio, now works as a freelance journalist and copywriter in the Pittsburgh area.

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