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The Illustrated History of Stealth Marketing
Caveat emptor, quia ignorare non debuit quod jus alienum emit. (“Let a purchaser beware, for he ought not to be ignorant of the nature of the property which he is buying from another party.”) – Oxford...
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Journalism Really Needs a V.P. of Optometry
Several years ago the hardtracking staff did a segment on NPR’s Here & Now about political operatives tricking out partisan websites to look like local news sources. The opening of the segment went...
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FTC Tells Influencers – Again – to Come Clean
As the hardtracking staff noted two years ago, the Federal Trade Commission has been chasing the paid posts of social-media influencers like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner. Turns out it’s not...
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More Russian Nesting Ads From Stealthy NYT
For the past four years the hardtracking staff has chronicled the drift by the New York Times toward cross-platform integration of native advertising, a.k.a. Russian Nesting Ads. A company runs an ad...
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Student ‘Social Influencers’ Earn F in Disclosure
College students have always been natural-born marketers. Among their friends, they toss off more winners and losers than a race course tout. But increasingly, they’re touting for dollars, as Claire...
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NYT, Tonight Show, Vanity Fair Get Stealthier
As mainstream media organizations suffer knee-buckling ad revenue declines, it’s not surprising that the stealth marketing industrial complex has shifted into high gear of late. Somewhat surprising,...
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These Stealth Ads Are Literally the Pits
This is the post Sneak Adtack was born for. From Ng Huiwen’s piece in The Strait Times: No sweat: Japanese company sells advertising space on women’s armpits Looking to promote your brand? No sweat. A...
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Pepsi Puts Its Ad and Movie Into the Same Can
Kyrie Irving is Pepsi’s choice of a new generation of ads. And New York Times culture reporter Sopan Deb has been on the Boston Celtics star like Brown on Williamson for weeks now. Start with this...
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Vanity Fair Pushes Native Advertising Into Email
Vanity Fair Studios, the in-house shop that produces branded content (a.k.a. ads in sheep’s clothing) for the Condé Nast publication, has been up and running for about five years now. But the other day...
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ABC’s ‘black-ish’ turns flack-ish in P&G sellout
Full disclosure: The hardtracking staff has never watched blackish, but we certainly understand the accolades the show has received for its adroit “unpacking of hard topics with humor and nuance,” as...
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Blogola Goes Big-Time in Mainstream Media
For several years now the hardtracking staff has noted the growing use of blogola in violation of Federal Trade Commission guidelines, from Lord & Taylor’s paying 50 bloggers under the table to...
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The Grey Lady Opens the Kimono All the Way
As the hardtracking staff has dutifully noted, the New York Times is increasingly blurring the line between advertising and editorial. Especially prevalent are the Russian nesting ads the Times has...
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Instagram Fesses Up to Instascamming Users
Turns out it’s not a pretty picture at Instagram. The wholly owned subsidiary of Facebook (a bargain at $1 billion five years ago) is the mobile equivalent of three-ad monte, allowing sponsored posts...
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The Native Advertisers Are Restless
Once around the park, James, and don’t spare the sources! The hardtracking staff has started to discern the dawn of Sneak 2.0 – a second wave of stealth marketing that tries to herd the ads in sheep’s...
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More Ru$$ian Nesting Ads From the Grey Lady
In an understandable effort to boost ad revenues (and thereby sustain its newsgathering operation), the New York Times has increasingly blended native advertising (widely touted as the financial...
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Native Ads: Bad News/Worse News Edition
In Marshall McLuhan’s landmark work The Medium Is the Massage (it was a printer’s typo he liked so much he stuck with it), the legendary media guru noted that “Real news is bad news – bad news about...
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Associated Press Says Yes, Economist Says No to Stealth Marketing
Two major news organizations have come to a split decision about whether to run ads in sheep’s clothing. From Brendan James’s piece in the International Business Times: Associated Press Rolls Out...
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Correction: Union-Busting Front Group Didn’t Hijack Jackie Robinson’s Photo –...
As the hardtracking staff noted yesterday, corporate gunsel Rick Berman’s stealth non-profit, Center for Union Facts, has been running this ad lately in the Weekly Standard. That raised a couple of...
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Anti-Union Front Group Hijacks Jackie Robinson
The hardtracking staff’s kissin’ cousins at Campaign Outsider have written extensively about Rick Berman, the corporate gunsel who sets up stealth non-profit groups to front for the liquor, fast-food,...
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FTC Cracks Down on Native Advertising
Lately, the Federal Trade Commission has been acting all kinds of feisty. First it busted two app developers for using “persistent identifiers” to collect kids’ information for targeted advertising....
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