Silly Oreo: going ‘native’ doesn’t mean going in disguise

As the ASA bans a string of ‘misleading’ YouTube videos featuring Oreo biscuits and well-known vloggers, Dominic Mills says getting native advertising wrong threatens to poison what could be a great platform.

Here’s an unlikely result from the trenches of the advertising war: CBBC Newsround 1: Mondelez Oreos 0.

Last week Mondelez was effectively handed a red card by the Advertising Standards Authority for failing to ensure that a vlogger-driven promotion for its Oreo brand was properly marked as advertising.

This, believe it or not, is the first time the ASA has made such a ruling. You might have expected, given the explosion in native advertising, that someone would have fallen foul of the ASA before now. That they haven’t doesn’t mean that no-one has infringed the rules before now; it just means they haven’t been caught.

For spotting this infringement we have to thank – surprising as it may sound – CBBC’s Newsround programme, which back in June noticed a series of YouTube films all themed around the idea of the ‘Lick Race’. They are pretty much as they sound: a load of vloggers trying to lick Oreos.

Newsround complained and after due investigation, the ASA found Mondelez guilty as charged.

You can see one of the offending videos here, suitably amended now so that a little box appears in the top-left corner with the words ‘This is a paid-for advertisement’.

So why didn’t they do that first time round? In its submission to the ASA, Mondelez says the brief explained that the vloggers should make it clear that they were working with Oreo. Which they did, but only in a very ho-hum, sort-of way.

The vloggers all say they’ve been given the biscuits by Oreo, and the video description box says ‘Thanks to Oreo for making this possible’, although it is possible this last adjustment was made afterwards.

The implication of this – and I’m sure that’s how the viewers saw it – is that vloggers dreamt up this jolly wheeze themselves, contacted Oreo, and off they went doing all this out of the goodness of their heart. I should point out too that none of the viewers complained.

But nowhere does it make clear that the vloggers were paid, and that fundamental obfuscation of the truth – you can call it dishonesty if you want to be especially merciless – is the problem.

And that is the major issue with native advertising: that going native doesn’t mean going in disguise.

In a pedantic/semantic way, I think this has its roots in the terminology. We commonly talk of people going ‘native’, and what we often mean is that people hide their true selves or adopt some kind of disguise to conceal their ultimate purpose. So talking of native maybe encourages deception.

It’s not surprising then that incidents like this happen, and will continue to. All this is bad for the advertising industry in the round because it threatens to poison a potentially effective platform. One of the Oreo videos drew 1.3m views (although a surprisingly low share volume of just 241 shares).

Despite its protestations, Oreo effectively surrendered control of the campaign to the vloggers, without a guarantee that they would necessarily play by the same rules.

So it’s almost inevitable when advertisers play in this space that something will go wrong. As the old adage puts it: ‘if you lie down with dogs, you’ll get covered in fleas’.

It may be that vloggers don’t understand that the health of the system depends on full disclosure. Why should they? It’s not their job.

Or it may be – more likely in my view – that, in their eyes, their self-respect and credibility with their audience depends on not being seen to take money from advertisers.

We’ve seen this before in the analogue world. Back in 2002, comedian Dennis Pennis (aka Paul Kaye) described himself as a ‘c**t’ for appearing in a Woolies ad. I don’t think he’s done an ad since (and we all know what happened to Woolies).

Things have moved on. Today, there are many vloggers – Zoella, Tanya Burr and so on – who are commercial animals, and therefore quite happy to be seen to take the advertiser’s pound. It’s certainly not doing their career any harm.

Equally, however, there will be others who take the Dennis Pennis line and think that an explicit commercial exchange harms their reputation. They therefore seek to disguise it.

None of this, however, absolves Oreo from any blame. Were they trying to play fast and loose? Were they complicit in this arrangement? Or did they just close their eyes and hope for the best?
Either way, they are guilty – of the sin of commission in the former, and the sin of omission in the latter.

The ASA, and good for them, leaves no room for doubt. It posted this statement on its website on the day of the ruling last week, explaining that the commercial use of vloggers has to be explicit, upfront, and made clear from the very start of the message.

It puzzles me as to why anyone would try to get round this. Advertisers who disguise their messages suffer when they get found out – as they mostly do – because it destroys trust. Vloggers similarly suffer with their audience if they are less than honest. More than ever, brands need trust.

Native advertising is a potentially powerful and effective tool, and when it’s done well – here’s an entertaining example from Buzzfeed for the Vauxhall Adam – it adds value to consumers, advertisers and publishers.

In the end, it’s all about being upfront, and labelling the message clearly and appropriately.

It doesn’t need over-regulation, it just needs a light touch to set the parameters which, as far as I can tell, is the ASA’s approach.

And that’s about all that’s needed, because the beauty of native is that it is inherently self-correcting. The most egregious examples of deception will get called out, the advertiser punished through negative publicity, and the lessons will be clear for all to see. As they are in this case.