Home   Bookmark and Share

 Print Friendly and PDF

CNN’s ‘Courageous’ Advertorial Mill

By Jim Naureckas

June 10, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "FAIR" - CNN has announced the formation of a new unit that will not report the news. Instead, it will take money from corporations to produce content that resembles news but is actually PR designed to burnish its clients’ images.

The name CNN gives to this mercenary enterprise? “Courageous.”

Giant Hornets Kill 42 People in China"--which CNN thinks is in South America (screen grab: Daily Buzz)

CNN hopes its “trustworthiness” will get corporations to pay it to make “news-like content” that will “tell advertisers’ stories.” (CNN screen grab: Daily Buzz)

It’s hard to see what’s particularly courageous about CNN‘s move, even if you see the destruction of journalistic boundaries as a heroic struggle. As a report about CNN‘s foray into “news-like content on behalf of advertisers” on a Wall Street Journal marketing blog (6/8/15) notes, “news companies from the New York Times to BuzzFeed to the Wall Street Journal have units that create advertiser content.”

Perhaps CNN anticipates courageously withstanding ethical criticism. As the Journal‘s Steven Perlberg notes, “These undertakings often raise church-and-state questions about the divide between the editorial and business sides of a company”–understandably, since the point of so-called native advertising is to create advertising vehicles “that feel like editorial work.”

But CNN‘s parent company insists that this is not about fooling consumers:

“This isn’t about confusing editorial with advertising,” said Dan Riess, executive vice president of integrated marketing and branded content at Turner. “This is about telling advertisers’ stories — telling similar stories but clearly labeling that and differentiating that.”

Mr. Riess said CNN’s trustworthiness when it comes to news was part of the reason Courageous would be attractive to advertisers.

“This is CNN. We’re not here to blur the lines,” he said.

So advertisers will come to Courageous because CNN‘s “trustworthiness” and unwillingness to “blur the lines” will be transfered by viewers to advertising content that is “similar” to CNN‘s news but “clearly label[ed] and differentiat[ed].” This is a business strategy, of course, that only works if the similarity outweighs the differentiation.

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.

Messages to CNN can be sent to here (or via Twitter @CNN). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

Click for Spanish, German, Dutch, Danish, French, translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load.

What's your response? -  Scroll down to add / read comments 

Email Newsletter icon, E-mail Newsletter icon, Email List icon, E-mail List icon Sign up for our FREE Daily Email Newsletter

For Email Marketing you can trust

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 Please read our  Comment Policy before posting -
It is unacceptable to slander, smear or engage in personal attacks on authors of articles posted on ICH.
Those engaging in that behavior will be banned from the comment section.
 
 

 

 

 

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information ClearingHouse endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

Privacy Statement