Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Bad press for adverorials

The Express's thinly veiled attempts to pass off advertorials as real news was tantamount to a Premiership star not trying too hard against his old club. At the end of the day, and with the score at 0-0, no-one gets hurt, so what if a few rules got a bent a little?

After all, how many travel puffs have you seen tarted up as the poetically knowing prose of the world weary. Or adjectives laden as a hefty tip in a breathless blurb disguised as a restaurant review?

I don't even blame Richard Desmond. He's a businessman. I'd expect him to do what he could to keep an advertiser happy.

But the question remains: how the hell did it get on the page? And it shouldn’t have taken the Advertising Standards Authority to see it for what it was – a creeping cancer that should have never dodged the copytaster’s spike.

As for ad concessions, I think the Sunday Express probably did enough with last week’s awful Tesco Club Card ad that reduced their splash on The McCann’s stalker to a mere five lines.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like the wheel or printing press is about to turn full circle. You must remember the bad old days of freesheets which had front pages full of ads with a wedding picture and caption as the "splash".
Editors need to go to SpecSavers if they think this sort of thing will increase revenue without having an effect on circulation.

Greg Watts said...

I laugh every time I see a splash on the front page of the Express, because I know the opposite is true. Exaggeration and fiction are the hallmark of much of the reporting in the Express. It's dreadful paper.