Advertising: Debating the Changing Economics of Editorial Content

Debating the Changing Economics of Editorial Content

Douggoodman.com

From left, Kurt Andersen, Henry Blodget and Ken Auletta on a panel titled “The Golden Age of Journalism?” at the MIXX conference on Monday.

AS the 10th annual Advertising Week in New York began on Monday, speakers and panelists were paying a good deal of attention to what appears in between ads â€" a k a editorial content â€" as well as to the ads themselves.

The focus on content creation was partly related to content’s being part of a major trend on Madison Avenue known as content marketing or native advertising, which seeks to skirt consumers’ aversion to being pitched by dressing up ads to resemble articles or programs.

“For most of the last 200 years, advertising has been defined in tandem with journalistic content,” said Randall Rothenberg, president and chief executive at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which is holding its MIXX Conference and Expo 2013 during the first two days of Advertising Week.

As a result, he added, “the changing economics of content” ought to concern the advertising and marketing industries.

That was the subject of a MIXX panel, titled “The Golden Age of Journalism?” moderated by the author Kurt Andersen, who is also the host of the “Studio 360” podcast. The panel members represented two divergent points of view on the state of journalism and the proliferation of news sources â€" or what seem to be news sources.

“What is happening now is wonderful for journalism and the world,” said one panelist, Henry Blodget, chief executive and editor in chief of Business Insider.

“The world is vastly better informed,” he added, because “we’re getting more information all the time” along with “the ability to distribute anything to anybody through links.”

“And we still have the old stuff,” Mr. Blodget said, referring to legacy media, though he acknowledged that “pockets of it are going through very rough transitions.”

The other panelist, the author Ken Auletta, who also writes for The New Yorker, replied, “My answer to you, Henry, would be ‘Yes, but.’ ”

“Yes, Henry is correct that the digital revolution has democratized information and created two-way platforms,” Mr. Auletta said. “But newsrooms are 30 percent smaller than they were 10 years ago, there’s 50 percent less reporting on city halls and 40 percent of the local TV news is dominated by traffic, weather and sports.”

Mr. Auletta also expressed disappointment that “by now, 15, 20 years into the Web,” there are fewer “indigenous news entities online” than he had anticipated, saying that the “commentary and aggregation” supplied by so many Web sites is not sufficient replacement for journalistic reportage. (He even joked how many Web sites that specialize in cat pictures “aggregate cat pictures; they don’t even make them.”)

If a typical newspaper was once “news and a couple of pages of Op-Ed,” Mr. Auletta said, a typical Web site is too often “Op-Ed and a couple of pages of news.” Mr. Blodget responded this way: “People have more choice now. That is good. It’s impossible to say that is a bad thing.”

Mr. Auletta replied: “Choice is good, no question about it. Choice about facts is not good.”

In a discussion of how well or poorly legacy news media are adapting to the new economics, Mr. Auletta praised The Guardian newspaper as “probably as advanced an online publication as there is” for one whose roots are in print.

Alan Rusbridger, editor in chief of The Guardian, was a member of an Advertising Week panel on privacy, which was focused on the Edward J. Snowden affair.

The world is experiencing a “golden age of surveillance,” Mr. Rusbridger told the moderator, Alex Wagner of MSNBC. “This is way beyond ‘1984’; Orwell could never have imagined anything as complete as this.”

Another reason that content was so popular a topic at various Advertising Week events is the growing affinity among consumers for using social media like Facebook and Twitter, where many of the most frequent and voluble discussions are centered on editorial content in the form of television programming, whether episodes of series, awards shows or live sports.

For instance, an Advertising Week panel, “Social Media Driving Social Change,” featured Ali Velshi, the former CNN correspondent who is a correspondent on the new Al Jazeera America cable channel, and Roy Sekoff, president of HuffPost Live at Huffington Post.

“We now use social media as a booking tool” to find guests for HuffPost Live video shows, Mr. Sekoff said.

Also, Twitter and the CBS Corporation announced a deal on Monday that involves clips and highlights from 42 shows being embedded into Twitter posts. CBS is joining a lengthy list of television companies that take part in an ad program of Twitter’s known as Amplify; 20 CBS brands are participating, including CBS News, CNET and Gamespot.

Amplify typically pairs video highlights and consumer advertising. Those packages are then delivered to Twitter users in the same way that other messages are sent on the service.

David Morris, chief client officer of CBS Interactive, declined to identify any advertisers, but said some would be announced soon.

“We’ve been out in the marketplace the last couple of weeks,” Mr. Morris said, referring to Twitter and CBS ad executives who have been visiting potential brand partners. “As we sit side by side in those sales calls, people get it almost instantly.”

During another MIXX presentation, Brian King, global brand officer at Marriott International, described how a new Marriott campaign, which carries the theme “Travel brilliantly,” includes a microsite, or special Web site, where consumers are invited to suggest and vote on, through social media, potential ideas for innovative changes at Marriott properties.

Many suggestions are related to improving how room key cards work, Mr. King said, laughing. “I can’t tell you how many complaints I get about that.”

Vindu Goel and Tanzina Vega contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on September 24, 2013, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Debating the Changing Economics of Editorial Content.