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.
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About Me
- Richard Burton
- I'm the former editor of telegraph.co.uk, a visiting lecturer at the University of Westminster, and a Fleet Street journalist of 25 years with Today, the Sunday Mirror and the Daily Telegraph. Until recently, I was managing editor of the Jewish Chronicle. I am now working as a publishing and PR consultant and freelance writer. My views here do not reflect those of any of those organisations.
2 comments:
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.
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.
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