US publishers may need to change their native ads
For one thing, the FTC doesn’t like the labels “promoted” or “promoted stories,” saying they can be misleading to consumers. Publishers should use words like “ad,” or “sponsored advertising content.” The FTC allowed that using the advertiser name in the label (“Promoted by [advertiser name here]”) was reasonable. Still, that leaves a lot of publishers with a lot of work to do.
Only 30 per cent of publishers are in compliance with the FTC’s new guidelines that address how ads are labeled, visibility of sponsor name and prominence of the label, said Todd Krizelman, co-founder and CEO of MediaRadar, which tracks and analyses ad data. Fully 26 per cent of websites run native without mention of the sponsor at all, his data shows. “The majority of publishers are actually going to be impacted by this announcement,” he said.
For starters, virtually no publishers use the word “advertisement” in their labeling. A review of 63 publishers’ native ads by native ad firm Nudge shows the most common terms were “sponsored,” used by 12.7 per cent; “presented by” (9.5 per cent); and “sponsor story” or “sponsored story” (7.9 per cent).
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