Welcome back to Drill. I'm Amy Westervelt. I know we've been away for a little bit. That's for two reasons. First, I've been working on a book that's done at least the first draft now. And second, we've been working on a few different seasons for this year, so we've got a lot of stuff coming your way today. An update on something that we've covered a few times in the past, advertorials.
I'm joined by doctor Michelle Amazon from Boston University. Doctor Amazone has done some of the best research on how people actually take in information from advertorials, whether they're able to differentiate between advertorial and editorial content, all that kind of thing. She's just completed a new study looking at how different interventions might work to help readers navigate an
information ecosystem that includes lots of advertorials. She particularly looked at how labeling on social media could help people figure out what's what, and also whether surrounding these ads could help people be inoculated to some of the misleading information that's often included in them. It's a really interesting study and we had a super interesting conversation to hope you enjoy it.
I'd love to know just a little bit of the background on what prompted you guys to undertake this study, What made you think, Okay, we need to look at what might be done about this stuff.
Yeah. So, I have been studying persuasion and misinformation for probably a decade now, and I started looking into native advertisements, just broadly, not specific to the fossil fuel industry. I published a number of studies about the use of native advertising, how difficult it is for the public to be able to identify native advertising and distinguish it from news reporting, news articles, and I think at one point I had
a study where I contrasted two native advertisements. One was from I think it was Colhan, so it was a fashion designer that ad was kind of imitating, mimicking soft news. The alternative native advertisement was from Chevron, which was examining global energy consumption, and that was more hard news oriented, And so the study looked at the differences between the two of those how difficult it was for consumers to recognize that this was commercial content and not genuine news reporting.
And that got me thinking, okay, well, how dangerous is it for fashion retailers to be using native advertisement compared to companies such as Chevron and other fossil fuel providers leveraging it. And so that's what got me thinking about who is using this type of advertising strategy. And I live in Massachusetts, and I was aware that in twenty eighteen, our state Attorney General sued Exxon for the claims they
were making in their advertisements. And I noticed that one of the exhibits in the lawsuit was a native advertisement that was created by T Brand Studio, and so I think that was the impetus. So I've continued to do more studies on this. I've been working on a book. I have a book coming out from MIT Press later this year about native advertising. And it became apparent that
it wasn't just happening in Massachusetts. You know, there's many states and municipalities who have brought forth these types of lawsuits, but there's not a whole lot of concrete evidence as to what exactly the impacts are. And so we decided, well, let's see if we can tease that out.
It's interesting because I've written about the native advertising stuff a bit and cited your research, so thank you. And actually the last time I wrote about it, I talked to someone that you know, was doing this stuff, but probably not as much as other outlets, and so the question was sort of like, why why continue to do it?
And the thing that really resonated with her the most because a lot of times newsrooms will just sort of say, oh, well, you know, we have a wall between an edit and the advertisers aren't influencing our reporting and all that kind of stuff, And I said, yeah, but that's not really the concern. The concern is that readers confuse these things
for each other. And I pointed her to the studies that have been done on that, and that was the thing where she was like, oh really, Yeah, so it does seem like something that at least some newsrooms might be looking for ways to minimize. But I wanted to ask you about the experiment that you ran, was kind of mimicking a social media feed?
Right?
Is that accurate to say?
Correct?
Yeah, And maybe I could have you walk through the two possible interventions that people were seeing in their feed and why you decided to look at those two things in particular.
Yeah, so I can preface it with the reason why we choose to format this as a social media post is because not only do these native ads live on the news organizations websites, but oftentimes these news organizations that are creating these ads, it's not an external ad agency, it's these in house content studios that are creating it.
Often they are contractually obligated to amplify these native advertisements, meaning it's not just residing on their websites, but the news organizations have to amplify these ads on their social media sites. And what some of my previous research has shown is that when native advertisements are shared on social media, frequently the disclosures that are required by the Federal Trade Commission that distinguish them as commercial content. Half the time
those disclosures disappear. And they are supposed to stick with. They're supposed to travel with the native advertisement no matter where it appears oh interesting.
So when it shows up on social that like paid for by thing there.
Wow, all the time it disappears wow. So that's why we decided to Okay, well, let's show this in a social media feed format. I do have to acknowledge that the New York Times, for the most part, they follow
the rules. They're labeling is good in terms of having labeling or disclosures, and they generally stay with the content when it appears on social media, so I want to be sure that that's clear because in this study we are focusing on a New York Times creative ad, but they could make their disclosures more prominent, they could use more clear language. We adopted the language that the New York Time uses, which is paid post, So that was
one of the interventions, is the disclosure. The New York Times uses the language paid post, which not everybody knows what that means, and that is one of the challenges of the current regulation of native advertising is that the FTC does not require any sort of standardization in terms of what the disclosures say, so the news outlet can call it whatever they want and they do so that makes it more confusing for the public when one outlet
is calling it this, another outlet is calling it something else, and so forth. So one of the interventions we had was the disclosure, and since this was an experiment, we had certain people who saw the disclosure and then other people we did not show them the disclosure, So that
was one of our manipulations. And then the other intervention we looked at was what we call an inoculation message, so it was a forewarning about the type of content that people may see in their social media feeds, and we had it, We had the source of that message as the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterrez, and you just basically talked about what's happening with the climate emergency and warning people to make sure the information that you see
that you rely on on social media from credible sources who have relevant expertise and who aren't motivating to greenwash their activities or to cherry pick data, so essentially encouraging people to be media literate. So that was the other intervention. Some people saw those messages, other people did not. Those
were the people in our control group. That people in the control group, they saw a social media post about sushi, which sounds kind of random, but in the academic literature that has been used many times.
Before, that's so funny.
Yeah, And then that was so first there was either the inoculation message or forewarning or the control message. And then people then saw the native advertisement from ExxonMobil, So either the one with the disclosure or the one without the disclosure. Those were the treatment groups, the two treatment groups, and then there was a third group that was again the control group who instead of seeing the native advertisement.
They just saw a social media post about a restaurant review, which is anonymous, and it was they we blurred out the name of the.
Restaurant just because it didn't really matter. Do you have a sense of how well these things work on social versus on the outlet's own website. I'm just thinking, like, Okay, I'm a climate reporter, have been for a long time. My own mother still occasionally sends me native as articles that she's seen on climate. Yeah, I mean.
I believe that. So I opened my book with a vignette about me grading my students' papers one of them, not one of them, a handful of them. We're citing a native advertisement they saw. Yeah, so I'm shocked, and I'm trying to figure out how did they how did this happen? And well, I won't give away the story. You'll have to get my book.
Yeah, oh wow, that's fascinating.
Yes, So, I mean even you know, it's it's everybody. It's college students, it's it's senior citizens, it's it's even college professors who get fooled by this stuff.
Yeah. Yeah, Okay. On the it sounds to me like from the results of your study, the inoculation messages work much better than the like the disclosures are necessary and should you know and should and could be much more large and prominent, but the inoculation messages seem to be much more effective.
Their functions are slightly different the disclosure. The function of that is to allow people to recognize that the content is commercial in nature, whereas the inoculation and is supposed to make people more resilient to influence.
Okay, Okay, So I can see how that would work on social I wonder how it would work on a website and whether you've looked at that at all, because I know sometimes these ads will intentionally be run next to like legit reporting, and I'm thinking especially around the potential of carbon capture, Like they'll often run this native ad that's like very positive about the potential of carbon capture right next to a reported piece that's like pretty critical,
and it has the effect sometimes I think of people thinking, oh, like there's two sides to the story or whatever, like there's the juries out but right.
Or sometimes they'll even sponsor a newsletter, like there's a lot of environmental newsletters that are sponsored by a fossil fuel property Yeah, so I don't think I've designed any studies to test that, but I agree with your conjecture that that probably muddies the waters for.
Consumers. I wonder if you have talked to any outlets in your research about how much might they be willing to do to counteract the potentially negative impacts of these ads. I don't know if you've heard anything from them on that front.
Yeah, well, I mean, I guess who were you talking to. I mean, I've talked to reporters like climate reporters.
Yeah, climate reporters buy and large really want their outlets to do something about this.
Yeah. Well, many of them are quite a guest at what's happening, and some of them have actually left their employer because the employer is accepting fossil fuel money and creating ads around them. I've also talked to reporters who have talked to people from the content studio, the people from the content studio, the product marketers or whatever you want to refer to them, as they will try and talk with reporters to coordinate to find out what they're
writing about. So, despite that presumed firewall between the newsroom and the business side of things, it's very porous, and you know, the reporters don't have much recourse, right, they can leave if they don't like it. Yeah, in terms of them saying to management, oh, we need to make these more clear, we need to make native advertisements more clear, I don't know. I mean, Jill Abramson got forced out of The New York Times because in part she thought
native advertising was a bad idea. And another point is that years ago, I believe it was the New York Times they swore off. They committed that they would no longer take tobacco industry ad dollars any kind. Yeah, but in twenty twenty one, Philip Morris International came back to them, came back to a lot of the majors that the legacy media in the US, and ran a native advertising campaign, not about cigarettes, but about their what do they call it, tobacco harm reduction efforts.
Yeah, that's that's right. And some people.
Pointed out, wait a minute, the New York Times and the Boston Globe are carrying this. They had committed that they would no longer take tobacco money, and how they're violating it. So I don't know how strong these commitments are when they make them.
I just have one more question for you. I know that the social media platforms themselves have been very resistant to any kind of labeling or content moderation or things like that. Increasingly so in the last six months, I know, I've seen people saying that even just the like verifiable information kind of labels our censorship. So I'm curious for your take on that. And i know that, you know, even research like yours is being targeted as sort of
like censorship, So I'm curious what you think about that. Yeah.
So I actually fielded a quick poll in January after Mark Zuckerberg made his statement about getting rid of the third party fact checking and found that I think it was two thirds of Americans do want content moderation on social media, and the majority of them think that fact checking is beneficial, and they were significantly us favorable towards what did he call it, community notes, Right, that's what he was going to pivot. So, I mean, we have evidence.
I mean, not that there was any question that that Zuckerberg was doing this for any reason other than to bend to the new administration. Nonetheless, here's empirical evidence suggesting that the public wants these sorts of labels. Yeah, you know, it's not censorship.
Yeah.
Yeah. You can still access the content, right.
You can still read it, you just have some context for it, all right. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Well, thank you so much. Amy.
That's it for this week, Thanks for listening. In case you missed it, last year we did a pretty exhaustive report on adveritorials, looking at which outlets were making the most of them for fossil fuel companies, how much money they were making, and what various researchers had to say about that, including Doctor Amazine. You can find that on our website Drilled dot Media, along with lots of other coverage. Our producer this week is Peter duff Our. Music is
Bird in the Hand by Foreknown. Thanksgin for insting, and we'll see you next time.