Here's What Else Is Wrong With Native Advertising
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One of the great media pleasures of the summer was getting to watch John Oliver’s trademark extended “Last Week Tonight” commentaries.
The show debuted in the spring, but the “Oliver rant” arguably became a bona fide social-media phenomenon — and a key part of the cultural conversation — the first week of June. (From the start, HBO made the canny decision to post the rants in full, in all their wordy, operatic glory, on YouTube.) That’s when Oliver’s scathing and very funny 13-minute deconstruction of the net-neutrality debate went viral (it’s earned 5.3 million views on YouTube to date). His rant about FIFA aired a week later (just before the World Cup) and also went viral (7.7 million views to date).
But the weekly rant that seemed to resonate the most among media and marketing types was his Aug. 3 takedown of so-called native advertising (which has racked up 1.9 million views to date — a surprisingly high number for such an inside-baseball topic). From his ad-free HBO perch, Oliver took on those who would champion a form of advertising that, in his view, mimics editorial content in a cynical attempt to fool consumers.
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