Sponsored content: to blend or not to blend. Part 3

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc. / LMMiami.com

• Does sponsored content pose a threat -another one- to ad agencies?
• See, in a majority of sponcon deals the media outlet deals directly with the client.
• If tomorrow you decided to promote your new financial product on, say, Fortune magazine, the way to go about would be as follows:

                   1)    You’d call the magazine’s ad sales department

                    2)    After agreeing on a price, they’d put you in touch with a staff writer who’s familiarized with the editorial style of the publication

• No middleman.
• No need for ad agency meddling.
• That being said, new sponsored content platforms emerge everyday aggregating and serving sponcon in various online pubs.
• The proverbial clickbait at the bottom of most on-line pubs these days.
• Has the one-size-fits-all practice of running the same insertion on multiple different media outlets has run its course?
• Consumers are too jaded and will tune your message out if it overtly looks like an ad.
• It is arrogant, flat-footed and possibly ineffective to run the same ad on the Sunday Times magazine and on Vanity Fair, two publications with quite different graphic design tone, manners and flavors.
• Then again, a publication is totally free to reject an advertising insertion that doesn’t fit is look or philosophy.
• As I pointed out in a prior installment of this series of articles, for centuries, if not millennia, the conundrum of advertising has been how to calibrate a kosher level of integration with its vehicles and surroundings.
• How forthcoming should an ad, in the broadest sense of the word, be about its intentions?
• Should it blend in or stand out?
• To be continued next week.