Black Ops Advertising by Mara Einstein review – stealth marketing is everywhere

On the internet, advertising is the industry that dare not speak its name. A Facebook post is “suggested”; a tweet is “promoted” – they are ads. An article or video is “presented by” or “sponsored” – it’s an ad. Even something as impressive as Felix Baumgartner’s skydive from the edge of space in 2012 – that was an ad, paid for by Red Bull. The term “content” serves to blur lines – helpfully, from an advertiser’s point of view – between what is advertising and what isn’t.

Google’s founders once wrote that any search engine that sold ads would be compromised; now it’s the biggest advertising company on the planet. Your smartphone, media studies professor Mara Einstein says, is fundamentally an ad-delivery device. Advertising is everywhere. And yet, increasingly, we don’t want to see it. We install ad-blockers because webpages are increasingly slowed down by waiting for intrusive adverts to be loaded from some distant server, and because we don’t want to be tracked around the internet by shadowy companies that trade our personal data. But who does ad-blocking really hurt? Clue: not the advertisers.

Because ad and marketing people have a twin-barrelled new wheeze, as Einstein explains in illuminating detail. There is “content marketing”, in which advertisers produce a “viral” video or whatever that admits, only very subtly, that it’s a piece of advertising, and millions of us perform the valuable labour of “sharing” it for them. On the other hand, there is “native advertising”, where news organisations set up internal departments to create adverts for commercial “partners” that will be displayed on their own websites, with the minimum possible acknowledgment that this is advertising and not editorial. And so lines become increasingly blurred, as Einstein points out: with content marketing, advertisers become publishers (they produce “films” not adverts; and they call their offices “newsrooms”), while with native advertising, publishers become advertisers. It is an arms race of stealth marketing or what Einstein nicely terms “obscured persuasion”.

But so what? You and I, of course, are expert consumers of the media, and we can always tell what is an advert and what isn’t. Or so we think. In fact, studies suggest that even confident, online-savvy millennials can’t, most of the time. “Content confusion” is pandemic. More seriously, and for very good reasons – those annoyingly slow ads, plus an understandable desire to take what is offered to us for free – most of us are complicit in ushering in a world where media organisations offering fully independent, fearless editorial may one day cease to exist. Publishers have to become stealth advertisers because Google and Facebook are hoovering up all the real ad revenue, and the use of ad-blocking is hurting the rest. The “open”, free business model for new media is plainly a bust. We are going to have to start paying for news, Einstein argues, if we want news to continue existing. In any case, as she points out, we pay for it already, just not with money but with our personal data – which, if we thought about it, we might consider markedly more valuable. “If we are not willing to pay for content, and if we don’t want to consciously interact with advertising,” she warns, “then the blurring of church and state is the price we are paying.”

Einstein’s explanations of all this – from internet news organisations to TV product placement and even dating sites – are thoroughly researched, elegantly explained and often alarming, even for readers familiar with most of the above facts in the abstract. Apparently, nearly half of Google users cannot distinguish between the ads and what are wholesomely termed the “organic” results; and shadowy data brokers such as Acxiom can come to learn a remarkable amount of personal facts about ordinary internet users. Profiling may be scandalous when the police do it, but it is all the rage online. In the US, if your name sounds African American, you are 25% more likely to be shown an ad that implies you’ve been arrested in the past.

I let out a little silent cheer near the end of this book when Einstein suggested that, instead of pulling out your phone in every idle instant, “maybe you could just be bored”. Like any good polemic, however, Black Ops Advertising does rather overstate the negative case about today’s internet. Along with many others, for example, I’d rather pay for Netflix than watch “free” broadcast TV interrupted by adverts, even if Netflix is doing its best to datamine my taste in kung-fu movies and technothrillers in order to design some new show that will doubtless be awesome. And, of course, not every piece of “content” that we “share” online is advertising: you wouldn’t know it from Einstein’s book, but there are still quite a lot of regular people writing and drawing funny things just to amuse their friends.

And even “liking” a product page on Facebook is hardly a one-way street if you sincerely admire the brand in question. Sure, as Einstein says, “marketers want to be friends with us so that we will do the work of sharing their content”, and to do so might be volunteering to perform what in the jargon is known as “unsponsored word of mouth”. But I do, in fact, like Rotring, the German manufacturer of mechanical pencils, as well as the Strokes, and I want to know what they’re up to. For such reasons, and whether we like it not, to be a total online refusenik – in the way Einstein suggests is the only healthy course of activity – may, these days, be to lead less than a full modern life