Skeptics like John Oliver believe that native advertising jeopardizes the credibility of established media corporations. He believes that, recently, the “integrity of news has become harder to protect” as publishers resort to advertisers to find new sources of revenue. With the advent of digital media, print publications especially have struggled to sustain their businesses and are now forced to accept advertising money in the form of brand publishing.
While Oliver’s outburst voices a genuine concern about the credibility of news and media, behind his stance is a scary thought or rather an implicit accusation to brands at the root of the conflict: brands cannot be trusted. Brands do not have enough credibility to publish content or news and that, in a way, places the credibility of the publisher in question.
This reasoning may not be far from the truth: the motivation that sits behind brands is not, by any means, altruistic. Brands exist to make money. They communicate to sell products. It may have been true, once, that brands played a role in people’s lives, but as products become more and more commoditized, brands struggle to find a reason to be, aside from making profit. To sustain their businesses, brands sometimes create the need and some other times innovate, but their credibility is always in question.
However, when brands advertise, people listen. Why is it, then, when communication comes in a different form, it is questioned?
What differs is neither the brand nor its message: it is the space in which the brand and message live. People are familiar with advertising as a technique for brand communication. This level of familiarity breeds acceptance. Advertising space is quantifiable and recognizable. When brands communicate outside of the conventional ad space, they seem conspicuous. Although sometimes quality of execution influences reception, it is often incompatibility between the behavior of the brand and the context in which it lives that causes discord. The problem as it stands is lack of coherence between the brand and the space.
As channels and formats change and evolve, brands must cope. Their behavior needs to change. A brand’s personality needs to be expressed concretely, not only visually. Its personality needs to manifest in its behavior. Conventional advertising space cannot fully capacitate developing brand narratives. It is perhaps time for brands to deinstitutionalize the way they communicate.
What does this mean for brands? Their identity needs to evolve in ways that allow it to adapt to different formats, environments, and contexts. This requires brands to become bigger than the products they sell. As the industry relies less and less on creativity, brands need to find a believable voice. Apart from owned channels, advertising space as it stands will cease to exist. A brand existing in an environment that it normally did not belong to should not raise eyebrows anymore. People need to become familiar with brands living in new spaces. Brands will have to make this happen. Their presence needs to be seamless with the environment: recognizable enough for people to take notice, yet credible enough to contextually belong. Brands capable of resolving this tension will be the ones more equipped to survive.