1. Wow, Universal Studios burned down yesterday.
2. Hold on, it says “ADVERTISEMENT” above the photo.
3. Oh, this whole thing is just an ad for Universal Studio’s new King Kong attraction.
4. Unseemly expletive.

As explained in detail on Charles Apple’s blog, what I mistook for a real newspaper was in fact a four-page advertising wrap. In other words, an advertorial.

When I was in traditional publishing, I fought to set limits to advertorials, but ultimately had to tolerate them. In my liberated state, though, I can finally say it: Advertorials are evil.

When I say advertorial, I’m not talking about all sponsored content that appears in a publication. Rather, I’m referring to any sponsored content that attempts to deceive the reader, even briefly, into mistaking it for something it’s not.

I’ve talked here before about how publishing and content marketing exist on a continuum, not distinctly separate, but more like siblings. Well, advertorial is like an evil twin, lurking in a vague netherworld between or above or below journalism and content marketing.

Its modus operandi is deception, not transparency. Both publishers and content marketers should disavow it, now and forever.

In this view, transparency is not in itself a guarantee of ethical content.  Rather, by disclosing the potential for conflict, it raises the bar for content creators. And by giving readers a reason to distrust them, it requires them to work that much harder to produce ethical content that will earn back that trust. As Miles puts it, “the art to great content marketing must then be, through the very act of providing neutral, targeted content . . . to position the company as a trusted information source for the future, to earn the respect of the audience through truthful content.”

What interests me in this comment is the way transparency, volitional or not, is viewed as the starting point of ethical content, not the end point. That distinction isn’t always clear.

Not much has been written yet on ethics in content marketing, but what has focuses largely on transparency. For Rex Hammock, for instance, transparency is the only constant of ethics:

“Transparency—a clear explanation of the sponsorships and relationships involved in the development and presentation of any media—is the foundation (or high ground) that must be adhered to whenever determining whether or not something is ethical. Frankly, beyond that, ethical standards are a negotiation between media creator and media receiver.”

To old-media minds, the idea that ethical standards are negotiable is offensive. Content creators, they would say, should not shirk their ethical responsibility by transferring it to the reader.

From the new-media perspective, however, that is a paternalistic argument aimed at maintaining control of the medium. The interactivity inherent in conversational media means the reader is not simply a passive recipient of information, but shares ethical responsibility.

While I agree with the new-media perspective as Hammock expresses it, there’s a danger to it. It’s too easy to leap to the conclusion that you don’t need anything more than transparency to guarantee ethical content.

As Mitch Joel says, and as I think Hammock would agree, it’s not true that you can do whatever it takes to get your point across as long as you are transparent about your intent:

“That is, simply, not the case. All cannot be forgiven by just waving your hand over a piece of advertising posed as real content and saying, “paid,” “sponsored” or “advertising” on it.”

Without specifying what it takes to get there, Joel says that credibility is the ultimate goal, and that’s much harder to achieve than transparency. As he puts it, “if you can build your brand by starting off with a foundation of transparency and then think about what you can do to create those real interactions between real human beings—understanding that this is a long road—you are well on your way.”

We might say then that transparency is the foundation of ethical content, but there must be a superstructure of walls and roof beams as well. Building that superstructure involves a lot of work and interaction with the audience.

Whether the architecture is always negotiable or involves some other constant principles is up for debate.  But this much is clear: Transparency is not all.

It may be true that it’s pointless to fight this trend, but the debate, to my mind, should be over whether it really works. It’s probably too early to say, but I’m inclined to bet that in the huge majority of cases, ghost writing and social media are fundamentally incompatible.

A lot depends, of course, on the extent and nature of the ghost writing. If it consists mostly of brainstorming, outlining, or light editing services, that’s helping the writer find his or her voice, not faking it. But let’s assume we’re talking about something closer to the extreme of a CEO who says “Here’s my idea. Write something.”

As Schaeffer notes, that’s not so different from the way many CEOs produce their speeches, annual-report letters, and autobiographies. So why, he asks, “do so many people seem to want to put blogs in a different class of writing?”

Curiously, though, his following sentence seems to do just that:  “In the world of corporate communications it could be argued that blogs are even less important and critical than a major speech or a document being submitted to the SEC.”

Well, yes, precisely. Blogs are less critical, because they constitute a different class of discourse. Most people do not expect blogs to be carefully articulated legal documents or corporate position statements. Rather, they expect some personal reflection, an unvarnished and informal expression of an idea. A blog should be driven by passion and conviction, not precise phrasing or good grammar.

If a CEO doesn’t care enough to write his or her own blog, why pretend to? Maybe, just maybe, a blog isn’t a good idea for most CEOs.  There’s a reason that the Fake Steve Jobs has a blog and the real one doesn’t.

So for me, it’s not a question of whether CEOs have the right to use ghost writers. Nor do I think writers should feel tainted by ghosting. In the end, what matters is whether ghost blogging is effective. Without the commitment to blogging that writing it yourself represents, the answer will almost always be no.

The comment that keyed Gordon’s column came from Kerry Smith, CEO of Red 7 Media (publisher of Folio:, by the way). As reported by Gordon, Smith said that even as direct revenue from print is declining, the medium is becoming more valuable. The reason for this, he said, is that “his magazines are most often the first point of contact leading to the sale of all the other services he is now selling.”

Gordon went on to observe that “today, publishers of all kinds are using the presence they have in their markets to start related businesses.”  That is to say, publishers are becoming content marketers.

As Gordon pointed out, this is not a new trend. But what was once, for most magazines, a tiny ancillary-revenue slice is now making up an ever-growing share of the total pie.

Now let’s suppose that as this trend develops among traditional publishers, a reverse trend takes root among content marketers. As the media content marketers produce get more and more sophisticated, advertising and even paid subscriptions will likely become viable revenue streams.

It isn’t difficult to imagine a future in which instead of a sharp distinction between content marketing and publishing there is a continuum.

On one end is the pure publishing model, in which all revenues come from advertising and subscriptions.

On the other is pure content marketing, where the money is entirely in sales of products and services.

In between is the increasingly crowded spectrum of publishers selling products and content marketers selling advertising and subscriptions.

It’s trendy for content marketers to say that we’re all publishers. Soon it may be just as hip for publishers to declare that we’re all content marketers.

In a press release last Tuesday, IDG explained that it’s new project, called “Strategic Content Services,” will “support the growing ‘vendor-as-publisher’ model” (publisher-speak for content marketing). Exactly what IDG’s “content development and content optimization services” will consist of is obscured by the typical press release jargon. But it appears that they will be offering a wide range of content strategy consulting, content creation, and software tools.

What makes this meaningful is the fact that IDG is in essence recognizing the irrelevance of its own media vehicles, at least for some of its potential advertisers.  It’s a big step beyond traditional custom publishing, which is nothing new for IDG. In that old model, the publisher is essentially saying to its customers, “You know nothing about publishing. Let us do it for you.”

But now, IDG is saying something very different: “You can do your own publishing. Here’s how.”

I don’t know whether Joe Pulizzi can be given any credit for IDG’s decision, but it mirrors his advice to publishers two years ago to choose “between trying to grow top line revenue within a business model that used to work well, but will be challenging to grow in the future – or – giving in to the new buyer behavior and help teach traditional businesses how to become their own publishers.”

Sometimes initiatives like IDG’s just fizzle out, other times they spark a revolution. It will be interesting to see which way this one goes.

Three weeks ago, in my last post on this blog, I asked the question, “Is B2B Ready for Corporate Journalism?“. My silence since then, alas, doesn’t mean I found the answer. (For my lack of production, blame a combination of travel, special projects, and, of course, my lizard brain.) What spurred my reflections was a comment from a journalist who didn’t believe that content marketing could live up to its journalistic ambitions.

That journalist, at least, understood those ambitions. But for every one who does, there must be 10 others who don’t.

Recently, for example, an esteemed B2B journalist I know said that content marketing is not new: “we used to call that PR.” There are two serious problems with this common confusion.

First, it means that journalists don’t recognize the challenge that content marketing poses to their traditional livelihoods. Unlike PR, which relies on third-party publishers to disseminate its message, content marketing simply cuts out those middlemen. Instead, companies that used to be advertisers go to the audience directly, in essence becoming publishers themselves.

But the confusion is also a problem for the discipline of content marketing. To fulfill its potential, it needs journalists. If those journalists think it’s all PR, they won’t bite.

So let’s try to clear it up.

Journalists: Content marketing is not PR, nor is it, in any sense you expect, marketing. In the broadest sense of the term, it’s publishing. It may not always be practiced with traditional journalistic values, but it often is.

Content marketers: Let’s face it, you have an image problem with journalists. If you want them on your team, you’re going to have to talk less about marketing and more about journalism. I agree that neither David Meerman Scott’s favored term, brand journalism, nor its cousin, corporate journalism, quite fits. But unlike content marketing, neither phrase makes journalists want to run for the hills.

Corporate journalism has a bright future. But until content marketers and journalists speak the same language, it will remain stubbornly in the future.

What adds heft to this view is its basis in experience. The commenter, Marylyn Donahue, is a former journalist who now makes a living writing for businesses. As Donahue sees it, there is a clear dichotomy between journalism and sponsored content. In journalism at its best, she asserts, the deliverable is truth. In sponsored content, the deliverable is the promotion of the sponsor’s point of view. Anything that might throw that point of view in doubt has to be left out, “even if it is true and even if it might help the reader understand something better.”

Though content marketing may try to mimic the balance of journalism, it’s an appearance, she says, not a reality:

“The real (ethical, if you will) problem with content-solution, custom publishing writing is that it is deeply dishonest to the reader. The reader is left not knowing what they don’t know. And the writer is complicit in making that happen. Why then does the writer do it? Because he or she is quite simply getting paid to tell it the way the client wants it to be told—no matter how “unbiased” it may come off sounding. (Good content solution writers are adept at balanced-sounding, but in fact one-sided pieces).”

It’s hard to argue against a position based on experience. But even if Donahue’s experience represents that of most or all crossover journalists, I wonder if it has to be that way. Does content marketing inherently compromise journalistic ideals ? Or does the problem lie with clients like Donahue’s, who don’t understand the point of brand journalism?

It’s clear, I think, that content marketing proponents would argue that this is a problem of implementation.  Take, for instance, Ike Pigott’s open letter to journalists on his blog earlier this month. He argues that journalists can in fact find “comfort in the belly of the beast” as what he calls “embedded” corporate journalists. Their purpose is emphatically not PR, he says: “People can smell marketing and propaganda coming around the corner, and they know when the pitches and puff pieces are missing that edge of neutrality.”

Helping to keep content marketing honest, says Pigott, will be the remaining independent journalists serving as editors and curators. “They will be the line of defense that says ‘This story from ACME stinks to high heaven, and I will blast them for their inaccuracy.’”

One embedded journalist, ex-IDG writer David Churbuck, agrees that corporate journalism is both possible and desirable. In a blog post several years ago, he described a corporate imperative to honor journalism’s passion for truth: “Organizations need to report upon themselves with the objective eye of a journalist, holding any statement or action up to the same skeptical, unconflicted scrutiny that an outsider would hold.”

This makes sense. But in practice, are businesses ready to adopt the practice of journalism so rigorously?

Rob Leavitt’s answer is a firm “maybe.” Reflecting on Pigott’s blog post, he thinks some companies will make the effort. But he’s not sure they’ll succeed:

“For now, B2B companies are mostly still struggling with how much to allow their own employees to go beyond strictures of message control and engage freely in social media and networks. If they can’t even do this, it’s hard to believe they’ll turn trained professional journalists loose in an even more ambitious effort to provide “accurate and fair” reporting with all the risks this may entail to their own reputation.”

Leavitt’s analysis speaks directly to Donahue’s objection that she must tell her story “the way the client wants it to be told.” The reality is, companies that want to control the message simply cannot produce authentic journalism.

I would like to think that as more companies get on the Cluetrain and realize that the new-media world is no longer about control, they’ll have a genuine interest in sponsoring legitimate journalism. But my optimism is theoretical. For now, at least, I will defer to Donahue’s dolorous voice of experience.