Tuesday, March 4, 2014

An anti-pension billionaire shows the five rules of deceptive native advertising

Click here to access article by David Sirota from PandoDaily.

In order to fully understand this article, I had to go on a 30 minute pursuit of what "native advertising" meant. The article uses the term throughout, but hardly defines what it means other than to suggest it is deceptive advertising. After much searching, I gather that it means using another, more legitimate media content to hide an advertisement. Googling the term led me to advertising industry sites and other media sites that used a variety of jargon to explain what they were doing. Although not totally satisfactory, Wikipedia offered the best explanation that I could find.

Surely you must be aware that advertising technology which has long ago infiltrated all capitalist media, is no longer used merely to sell products. Such technology is also widely used to sell political ideas to serve the class that owns the media--the capitalist class. In this article Sirota lists five strategies that one billionaire has used to promote the slashing of public worker's pensions via public television (PBS).