South Park Tackles Digital Journalism & Native Advertising

I’ve been a South Park fan since University days (OMG over a decade ago!). Animated satire works for me and apparently a lot of other people too, since the show has been running for nearly two decades.

The last two episodes in Season 19 entitled “Sponsored Content” and “Truth and Advertising” respectively got me thinking about how advertising has really evolved.

The episodes touched on ad-blocking, click-bait and native advertising.

Of course in true South Park style, the seamless integration of native advertising into regular content platforms was ultra-exaggerated but the take-away message really is that the very effective native advertising pieces are those that really don’t appear like an ad at all but it mirrors the content on the platform and gets people lost in its content or message. Essentially native ads really should be, and the good ones usually are, hard to distinguish as ads but they are so “native” to the publisher format that they appear to be desired and demanded content.

Having had the discussion with several friends not in the Advertising industry I realized that a lot of people could relate to the South Park episodes. In fact my friends ranted about pop-up banner ads online, YouTube ads disturbing their streams, click-bait articles that wasted their time and much more. However, while as consumers we may feel bombarded by ads as though people were bidding for our attention and dispensable income, we still need ads to be aware of what our options are, so we can make informed purchasing decisions. We also need ads to keep the competition levels high among businesses since this also drives down the prices. Advertising also ensures high quality of services and products because false advertising is illegal in most countries. In fact, advertising fuels the bidding war among businesses as they try to present the highest quality at the most affordable prices which reaps awesome rewards for consumers .

I am both a member of the advertising industry as well as a consumer and the truth is - we need each other (advertisers/consumers). The aim is to find the right balance to achieve a symbiotic relationship. Moving away from South Park’s criticism I think native advertising is the way to do this. If ads are entertaining, informative and relevant, reaching its target audience - as all other publishers do - then advertising would really have evolved to where it will be most effective, surpassing the already established native ads average engagement rate of 57%.

The other point that South Park really tried to highlight was the possible compromise of journalistic integrity with native ads. The over-emphasized point was that people could not identify an ad different from the news, so how do we continue to trust the news? The main thing to remember here is that the purpose of the news is to make people aware of what is happening in society, if advertisers want people to be more aware of their products and services (honestly – no sensationalism) and the information in the ad was not yet popular knowledge, why is that not worthy content to be viewed and shared and appreciated by all? If we were to be honest with ourselves, is native advertising really destroying digital journalism? I think it offers a healthy balance where all the information the audience receives (ads or general content) is formatted to suit their preferences.