Oh, I know that advertising is the magic that keeps the infotainment rolling in on my Net connection… but CTV has just plain blown it with their latest innovation.
(As a side note, we need a better word than “innovation” to describe a development that, while an advance if viewed in very narrow technical terms, is socially, aesthetically and morally retrograde. …Very funny. Something other than “Windows,” please.)
Have a look at this review of Chicken Little. See those double-underlined words? They’re sponsored links. As far as I can tell, some not-too-clever filter is randomly linking phrases in the article to advertisers’ web sites — often with little actual relationship to the phrases’ underlying meaning. (A reference to the Disney flick Home on the Range gets linked to a music download service offering the country music song of the same name.)
So far, only the entertainment news is being graced with this little enhancement. Here’s hoping the idea dies there, because it’s a bad one.
Set aside for a moment the question of whether the encroachment of advertising is a positive or negative trend. Think instead about how this erases the line between editorial and advertising.
After all, we’re used to seeing links in a web page and thinking they relate to the content that houses them. If it’s a link from an ad, we assume it’s an ad-related link; if it’s a link from a news article, we assume it will take us to information that elaborates, even tangentially, on the story.
And the thing about that assumption is, it works for everyone. Content providers can tell richer, more compelling stories, and readers can quickly assess whether they want to follow a link or continue reading.
Bottom line: we’ve learned to trust links in news stories, and the CTV approach betrays that trust, selling it to shills.
True, it’s only the entertainment news so far. But CTV’s entertainment news isn’t all Jessica Simpson and Ben Mulroney; it includes — among other things — a politically-charged discussion of the historical accuracy of George Clooney’s film about Edward R. Murrow.
They’ve done exactly one thing right: the fake links are conspicuously different from real ones. Mouse over a few of the double-underlined come-ons, and you’ll quickly learn to give them a wide berth. But even then CTV screws up; they’re so conspicuous that they detract from the flow of the articles.
Again: this is a bad, bad idea. Kill it now, before it spreads.
