CNN have launched a new “advertorial mill” unit that will take money from Corporations and produce content that looks like “news” but is actually slick PR aimed at promoting its corporate clients’ brand.
CNN call the new unit “Courageous” – we call it “fake news”.
Fair.org reports:
BYPASS THE CENSORS
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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.
Sean Adl-Tabatabai
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