Old school advertorials can still be effective if you follow these rules

Let’s go exploring! Follow me on a search for the old school advertorial. Let’s see if we can track one down and discover whether there’s any future for this ancient marketing creature.

Look. There, deep in the middle pages of the current TIME magazine. The markings are clear: a change in font; clunky design; excessive use of CEO headshots; articles on companies accompanied by full-page adverts for those companies. No doubt about it. Twelve pages! What a beauty.

So is this content marketing? Is it effective and is there a better way to do it?

The 12 pages run continuously. It feels like an internal supplement but doesn’t have the editorial structure to be one. Headlines and sells are confused and don’t necessarily match the text. The editorial itself is clearly partisan, focusing on one business and giving its leaders column after column to explain why they are market-leaders. The content is attributed to a third party but nowhere does it state that it is advertorial, paid for or sponsored.

The adverts that were clearly sold as a package with this promotional text do not run facing the articles, but on the next spread. It’s a gesture towards subtlety but one that only the most obtuse reader will not see through.

With full-page ads and editorial from Ford, Philips, Seat (and, bizarrely, Lavazza) there is clearly a demand for such packages. The inclusion of quarter page ads from obscure mining companies does however suggest that there was some difficulty in selling all the space.

It appears that the pages were produced by a third party for TIME who just dropped them in. Did it bring in revenue and additional pages? Undoubtedly. Does it undermine the editorial credibility of a highly regarded magazine? Perhaps, but as marketers, that is not our immediate concern.

What are the lessons for brands and content marketers?

If you are paying for print advertorial, deal directly with the magazine. Insist that the design sticks to the grid and fonts of the rest of the publication, and that it is laid out by the magazine’s own staff. This will ensure it has the look and feel of the rest of the mag.

Discuss the content with the editorial staff as well as the sales staff. The former best know the readers and what they want to know and find engaging.

Balance quantity and quality. Having 1,500 words of text may sound better value than paying the same money for 1,000 words – but if the design ends up cramped and unapproachable without the usual pull-quotes and subheads, you’ll be losing out.

Spend the budget on the advertorial, not on advertorial plus advertisement. Running the two together devalues the article. The only exception to this is if you have kept the text very objective and so not raised the suspicions of the reader.

Be clear about your objective. Do you want to run an advertorial that includes enough shameless self-promotion that some of it will find its mark? Or is your aim an article that educates the reader and provides real value, while also building your brand equity.

Find out who your neighbours will be. An advertorial that appears among pages of straight editorial will have much more impact than similar coverage that forms part of a promotional section, or even worse, a supplement that can be easily thrown away.

Is it worth it?

So was the section in TIME a bad piece of marketing? Not necessarily. It had the great advantage of a very high open rate. A vast number of eyeballs would have landed on those pages. You may delete an email without reading it but you’ll normally flick through a magazine at the very least.

Did those eyeballs linger? That’s the big question. My guess is that the text on the first one or two pages would have been fairly well read, but then readers would have realised they were being sold to and moved on.

And, to be fair, there was some interesting stuff in the text. It was just extremely one-sided and lacking in journalistic rigour.

The value of such old-school advertorials depends on how much they cost. They may not be fashionable and done badly they could even be damaging. But it is also worth remembering that there is little point creating state-of-the-art compelling content if no-one gets to read it.