We all have our go-to news site. For some it’s probably SkyNews or BBC, but for me, it’s NBC News. NBC News and MSNBC is what I turn my tv to when I watch the news and NBCNews.com is my Safari homepage. It’s the news site (and company) I’m most familiar with, and that includes navigating the ads I see on there every day.
NBC News is just a small part of the Comcast Corporation (think NBCU television, Dreamworks movies, and theme parks to name but a few). As stated on the NBC News website “NBC News is part of the NBCUniversal News Group, a division of NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast Corporation.” Because NBC News falls under the Comcast umbrella, some of the ads you see on their website are for other members of the Comcast family. Some of the more recent ads you see on NBC News are for the new show Mr. Mayor.
It’s (in the United States) a new show airing on NBC, and with these ads, NBC is staying within the NBCU and Comcast family and promoting their own. This is essentially brands-owned content; Comcast owns NBC News and is using their news site to promote their new NBCU show. It is all connected. And this isn’t the first time Comcast has used their NBC news site to promote their NBCU content; they also often use their multitude of television channels to cross-promote content from those channels (promos for the Premier League on NBC Sports can sometimes be seen on main NBC).
Comcast is operating under the assumption that if you like their news division, then it’s more likely than not you’re going to like the content coming from their entertainment division, and this is the perfect place to make you aware (especially if in this day and age you are constantly and consistently checking the ever-changing news).
But this isn’t the only kind of advertising you’ll find on NBCNews.com if you scroll down far enough. Eventually you’ll get to a section on the website that is only advertisements but are made to look like their news posts if you’re not paying attention or not as familiar with the site.
Based on its appearance, this would be considered Native Advertising as explained by Hardy. “‘Native’ distribution of marketers’ paid content (advertising): ads integrated into webpages, apps and news feeds in social media.” As you can see, these are ads on the website made to look like articles but are definitely not. If you look closely, you can see at the beginning of the ads that they are from the content recommendation firm Taboola (which is one Hardy made a mention of in his lecture). So you get to the Taboola ad feed and then you have to scroll for a little bit before getting back to the news articles, and even then, there’s only one bloc of articles before you get back into the advertisements. This is what it looks like as you continue down the website; the important news is at the top but as you continue down the page, the ads become increasingly co-mingled with the articles. I think it’s easier to then accidentally click on one of those ads because of this. You go to click a news article and find yourself looking at mansions for an unbelievable price. And that’s increasingly becoming the norm for any site you find yourself on, news or not.