On Native Advertising and Advertorials

with its rulings or observations. Kind of like the President of India.

There’s outright paid news and then there are the modern versions of advertising that are nothing but cleverly disguised paid news. Thus, there is something called native advertising. It is a type of advertising that relies on content, usually an article or a video, that matches the platform on which it appears and the interest of the platform’s readers or viewers. The idea is to create buzzworthy or share-worthy content with a view to promoting the product of the advertiser by carefully and cleverly merging the content and the product. Even though the content in question may be labelled with a ‘promoted by’ or ‘sponsored by’ tag, often times customers fail to recognise them as sponsored posts, which isn’t surprising as the aim is to seamlessly blend in the advertising bit into snappy, easily digestible content. To put it bluntly, the line is meant to be blurred. On popular platforms, it can take the form of a Buzzfeed quiz, a paid post on a newspaper, a promoted Tweet, or a suggested Facebook post.

Advertorials (advertisement + editorial) have been around for long, in the form of a newspaper section designed to look like any other non-editorial content, in TV and radio infomercials, or in a magazine article that mimics the look and feel of a legitimate news item. The basic rule is that although it is advertisement, it is made to create the illusion of editorial content while still making an obvious pitch for the product. While the difference between native advertising and advertorial is fuzzy, the former