FTC Native Advertising Workshop (updated)
Native Advertising Workshop
Federal Trade Commission
December 4, 2013
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2013/09/nativeads.shtm
Agenda: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2013/11/nativeads.shtm
The Federal Trade Commission will host a workshop on December 4, 2013 in Washington, DC to examine the practice of blending advertisements with news, entertainment, and other content in digital media, referred to as “native advertising” or “sponsored content.”
Increasingly, advertisements that more closely resemble the content in which they are embedded are replacing banner advertisements – graphical images that typically are rectangular in shape – on publishers’ websites and mobile applications. The workshop will bring together publishing and advertising industry representatives, consumer advocates, academics, and government regulators to explore changes in how paid messages are presented to consumers and consumers’ recognition and understanding of these messages.
The workshop builds on previous Commission initiatives to help ensure that consumers can identify advertisements as advertising wherever they appear. This includes recent updates to the Search Engine Advertising guidance, the Dot Com Disclosures guidance, and the Endorsements and Testimonials Guides, as well as decades of law enforcement actions against infomercial producers and operators of fake news websites marketing products.
The FTC invites the public to submit original research, recommendations for topics of discussion, and requests to participate as panelists. The Commission also invites the submission of examples and mock-ups that can be used for illustration and discussion at the workshop. Topics the workshop may cover include:
- What is the origin and purpose of the wall between regular content and advertising, and what challenges do publishers face in maintaining that wall in digital media, including in the mobile environment?
- In what ways are paid messages integrated into, or presented as, regular content and in what contexts does this integration occur? How does it differ when paid messages are displayed within mobile apps and on smart phones and other mobile devices?
- What business models support and facilitate the monetization and display of native or integrated advertisements? What entities control how these advertisements are presented to consumers?
- How can ads effectively be differentiated from regular content, such as through the use of labels and visual cues? How can methods used to differentiate content as advertising be retained when paid messages are aggregated (for example, in search results) or re-transmitted through social media?
- What does research show about how consumers notice and understand paid messages that are integrated into, or presented as, news, entertainment, or regular content? What does research show about whether the ways that consumers seek out, receive, and view content online influences their capacity to notice and understand these messages as paid content?
Agenda
9:15 Registration
10:00 Welcoming Remarks
Edith Ramirez
Chairwoman, Federal Trade Commission
10:15 A Historical FTC Perspective: Advertorials, Infomercials, and Paid Endorsements
Lesley Fair
Staff Attorney
Bureau of Consumer Protection, Federal Trade Commission
10:30 The Wall Between Editorial and Advertising: Its Origins and Purpose
Nicholas Lemann
Professor of Journalism
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
11:00 Panel 1
Sponsored Content in Digital Publications: The forms it takes and how it operates
Moderator:
Laura M. Sullivan, Staff Attorney
Division of Advertising Practices, Federal Trade Commission
Panelists:
Tessa Gould, Director of HuffPost Partner Studio
Huffington Post
Todd R. Haskell, Senior Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer, Hearst Magazines Digital Media
Hearst Corporation
Lisa LaCour, Vice President of Global Marketing
Outbrain Inc.
Chris Laird, Marketing Director, Brand Operations
The Procter & Gamble Company
Ash Nashed, Chief Executive Officer, Adiant
Adam Ostrow, Chief Strategy Officer, Mashable, Inc.
Steve Rubel, Executive Vice President and Chief Content Strategist
Edelman
12:30 Lunch Break
1:30
Lessons of Nauru
Bob Garfield, Co-host of On the Media and MediaPost columnist
2:00 Panel 2
Consumer Recognition and Understanding of Native Advertisements
Moderator:
Michael Ostheimer, Staff Attorney
Division of Advertising Practices, Federal Trade Commission
Panelists:
Jamie Cole, Creative Director, Red Barn Media Group
Michelle De Mooy, Senior Associate, National Priorities
Consumer Action
David J. Franklyn, Professor, Director of the McCarthy Institute for IP and Technology Law
University of San Francisco School of Law
Dan Greenberg, Chief Executive Officer, Sharethrough
Co-Chair of Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Native Advertising Taskforce
Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Lecturer in Residence and Director of Information Privacy Programs, Berkley Law & Technology Center
Jeff Johnson, Principal Consultant, UI Wizards
3:30 Break
3:45 Panel 3 The Way Forward on Transparency: A discussion of best practices
Moderator:
Mary K. Engle, Associate Director
Division of Advertising Practices, Federal Trade Commission
Panelists:
Laura Brett, Staff Attorney
National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus
Sid Holt, Chief Executive, American Society of Magazine Editors
Amy Ralph Mudge, Partner, Venable LLP
Jon Steinberg, President and Chief Operating Officer, BuzzFeed Inc.
Robin Riddle
Global Publisher of WSJ Custom Content Studios, The Wall Street Journal
Robert Weissman, President, Public Citizen
Mike Zaneis, Senior Vice President, Public Policy and General Counsel,
Interactive Advertising Bureau
5:30 Closing Remarks
Jessica Rich, Director
Bureau of Consumer Protection, Federal Trade Commission