Identifying digital advertising: Paradoxes and problems in governance

Hardy, J (2024) ‘Identifying digital advertising: paradoxes and problems in governance’, in MacRury, I. and Manika, D. (eds) Digital Advertising Evolution. Abingdon. Oxon. Routledge, pp.293-310.

This chapter addresses two paradoxes. The first is that since 1966 the leading international code of advertising, first created in 1937 by the International Chamber of Commerce, has clear rules on the identification of advertisements. This requires that “advertisements should be clearly distinguishable as such, whatever their form and whatever the medium used” (ICC 1966: 8; ICC 2018). That 1966 wording is instructive, because it is not anachronistic, it has the scope to include influencer marketing today, or indeed any of the new and hybrid digital ad-formats that began from the 1990s, three decades after it was written. Yet, there have been successive waves of integrated and disguised ads in the digital era. The second paradox sits within the first. There has been increasing regulatory, and self-regulatory, action and guidance worldwide in the period since the US Federal Trade Commission (2015) produced updated guidance on native advertising in 2015, yet mounting non-observance. So, we have the coexistence of a principle of identification of advertising, to which the marketing communications industries pledge allegiance, and the growth of practices, also lauded as legitimate, whose status as marketing communications is unclear, or actively disguised. These two paradoxes exist within a deeper paradox whereby contradictory qualities are simultaneously advanced as compatible, within industry and regulatory discourses: advertising forms that seek to be integrated, “native”, and blended into non-advertising content environments must nevertheless be disclosed as marketing communications.

This chapter focuses on explanations for the paradoxes in the governance of digital communications. The aim is not to proffer a putatively “definitive” causal explanation. There are many different elements that need to be explained, and each explanation would also need to be multicausal and anchored in specific contexts in time and space. Instead, the chapter discusses some key areas where we may search for explanations, considers the range of factors that can provide a framework for explanations, and identifies research agendas to do so.