Hacker News Reader

Comment by apozem | Hacker News Reader

Yes. If you are paid to advertise something, it is an ad.

The law is having trouble catching up on this front, especially in a world where any YouTuber with an audience could potentially run undisclosed ads. Regulating people posting videos out of their basement sounds like a nightmare.

That said, I do my best to never support content creators that don't disclose ads or hide their disclosures in hashtags or below the "Show more" button in a YouTube description. That's not a real disclosure. You know it and I know it. That's why you put it there in the first place- because no one will see it.

View on HN

Never mind YouTubers. I regularly see undisclosed advertisements on national broadcast television shows, like Good Morning America, to name a particularly egregious obfuscating advertiser. It is completely obvious to me when something is a (likely paid, somehow) promotional advertising rather than informational reporting.

It is obvious to me when ABC constantly promotes content owned by its parent company, Disney. But I often have to say to my spouse, "You know that's an ad, right?" and hear the response, "Whaaaaaat? No way, really? Now that you mention it..."

There is still a cohort of journalists hanging on to their last shred of professional ethics that will always disclose both paid consideration and corporate relationships between the subject of a story and their employer, but they seem to be slowly dying out.

YouTubers are the least of our problems. Native advertising is already firmly entrenched in mass media.

Isn't any product featured on that show basically a paid advertisement? My wife would occasionally watch it, and I recall seeing them show off clothing all the time (complete with models parading in front of the camera.)

If the segment includes a fashion editor/advisor from a magazine, the clothing and accessories featured are advertisers for the magazine, not paying GMA directly (to my knowledge).

I did a little freelance on the magazine side, putting packages together to show the fashion labels what coverage the magazine was able to get. I have know idea if this cost extra or it was more of a incentive to purchase bigger ad buys in the magazine. This was nearly a decade ago, but at the time I don't believe the morning shows were paying labels or the fashion consultants, it was more of a quid pro quo.

Obfuscation of the mutual back-scratching arrangements does not obviate the fact that the segment airing on national broadcast television is not being disclosed as an advertisement, nor that many viewers will not necessarily recognize it as such without outside assistance.

It is really very well done if you consider it objectively. The show that is itself loaded with inlined advertisement is also able to sell traditional advertisement time in its segment breaks.

But in my own opinion, shows that do that sort of thing need to be nuked from orbit, and the glass broken up with jackhammers so that salt may be plowed into the dust underneath. I simply cannot abide the ubiquity and intrusiveness of advertisements in the current culture.

News companies have tools to help schedule advertisements in ways that don't make the advertiser look bad (airing a segment on oil spills then don't advertise BP).

While advertisers don't explicitly ask media companies not to run negative segments, they can book a large commercial inventory and incentivize as much.

Oh I agree and didn't mean to infer otherwise, just doing my bit to illuminate the process (a process that might have changed since I was last involved a decade ago).

What if it's a free trip sponsored by Red Bull?

What if you pay $1 for the trip?

What if it's 50% off the trip?

...

Is a social referral program an "ad"?

There's plenty of gray area where you're gifting something non-cash, like an experience that you are interested in anyway. Look at the Kylie Airbnb deal for instance.

> There's plenty of gray area ...

There's not. Journalism and politics have this covered:

NO GIFTS.

It's really that simple.

What constitutes a gift is definitely a gray area, and very culturally specific. It's nice to want things to be black and white, but reality doesn't always line up.

This is why most government agencies have strict policies to never accept any sort of favor from organizations or people they do business with. Even if it's a "I'll pay for lunch next time, you can pay next time."

Basically, if there is even a remote chance that the action could be misconstrued as a gift when viewed from the outside, it's politely rejected.

I was part of a government group that regularly accepted airfare, lodging, and meals. There was demand for us, but we didn't have the funding to travel on our own.

One time this created a funny situation where a pro sports team flew us out on their private jet. While we were in the air, they were about to hand out hats with their logo on them, and the head of our group had to stop that until he could consult the lawyers about that gift. It felt like an overreaction in the particular situation, to say the least.

> NO GIFTS.

Uh, every single time a "journalist" is easy on a subject so that they can get future access, that's a gift from the subject in exchange for them going easy.

Journalism as actually practiced is almost a definition of what a "gift" culture is, especially political journalism.

What about giving a discount to customers who let me use their testimonials on my site?

This one is pretty clear: if they wrote the testimonial before receiving the discount, and did not have the expectation that they were going to receive a discount, then that's OK, because their testimonials are not biased by the discount.

And the other way around? Let's say I have a campaign. "Write a testimonial and get a discount.". I mean, they can write whatever they want.

I think we need another approach to this problem.

On the face of it, I agree with you and support the spirit of e.g. FTC advertising standards.

However, this is a much deeper problem with our culture and relying on regulatory bodies isn't going to cut it as "the media" is so fragmented now and there are so many ways to circumvent (like hiding your disclosures in hashtags).

Rather than trying to curb this with legislation, I think we should try to counter it with education. An understanding of how and why a piece of information reached you should be part of the toolbox of every literate person.

I've started seeing a lot more very obvious paid "ads" from people I follow on Snapchat.

"I'll just print it out using my awesome $brandname $modelnumber printer"

Every day for a few weeks in a row. -_-

> Yes. If you are paid to advertise something, it is an ad.

Good luck with that definition. Is a person wearing sponsored designer clothing on the red carpet obligated to declare that the didn't pay for it? Or does that obligation only arrive when someone takes a photo of them?

I do think that sponsored posts are a big problem, but it's exactly as much of a problem as the product placement that buffets us elsewhere in life, and equally as impossible to prevent.

> Is a person wearing sponsored designer clothing on the red carpet obligated to declare that the didn't pay for it.

Yes? How is this even a question? A company paid them in the form of an outfit for the sole purpose of having it be seen. There is no interpretation of this situation where it's not an ad.

This is already a solved problem, just let the NCAA regulators handle it [1].

1. http://grfx.cstv.com/photos/schools/unc/genrel/auto_pdf/hand...

> Yes? How is this even a question? A company paid them in the form of an outfit for the sole purpose of having it be seen. There is no interpretation of this situation where it's not an ad.

Well, except real life, where we need to work with facts instead of idealism. Nobody is denying it's an ad, I'm denying that it's possible to eradicate product placement. This is not a new problem for Instagram, it's a fact of life that we have always dealt with.

A checkbox when posting to denote that content was influenced by provision of gift/service. Then the platform (Instagram, for example) has a subtle but recognisable mark on that photo or caption. Threat of fines for non-compliance, but only really police the main users so they lead by example. Make it easier and less damaging to comply for the major users than to avoid it. Make it like the cachet associated with being "sponsored" in extreme sports so smalltime users aspire to follow suit.

> Regulating people posting videos out of their basement sounds like a nightmare.

We already do that for copyright infringement, so why not use the same techniques and technology for promotion detection?

Copyright infringement detection is looking for a specific thing (or, y'know, hundreds of specific things). Particular sequences of sounds or images.

Promotion detection would be looking for any promotion of a product or service. That's an AI-complete problem.

There are lots of ways to infringe copyright with new content. For example, if I posted a video of an amateur performance of the new Star Trek™©®ß film, that would be copyright infringement. Of course, the copyright owners tend to be less concerned about that sort of thing, but the fact remains that the rules regulate a lot.

Sure, there are plenty of more subtle ways to infringe copyright -- and I bet the automated tools fail to catch almost all of them.

We don't need to regulate the people in the basement, just the companies sending 'gifts'.

You're right. This problem is unsolvable. Everybody go home.

Unsolvable automatically, using technologies currently available. I am not proposing despair, just saying I don't think the existence of automatic tools for identifying some kinds of copyright infringement gives much reason to think we could build automatic tools for identifying product placement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com