When Does “News” Become “Marketing?”
27th August 2006 by Mark Weiner
If a news story about an organization is copied and posted on that organization’s website, is it still news or is it marketing?
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August 28th, 2006 at 9:25 am
Hi Mark - first blush, it’s marketing. More thoughtfully, it’s still news — provided it’s not edited and includes the source info, and bears no commentary. This question has echos of the Nike case and the definition of commercial speech — we have to define closely what constitutes marketing; I believe it should be two out of three: whether the organization has control of the execution (one of our folks wrote it), the distribution (it’s on our Website) and the messaging (it’s based on our news release). So, in your example, whether it’s marketing or not depends on where it originated, what its source material was, and where it appears. Depending on the content of your example, it may or may not be marketing…
Tell us more…
Sean
August 30th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
While Sean argues — with good reason — for clear definitions, and while I’m known to urge clarity of definition, I’m willing to argue for elastic definitions. And definitions that apply in a particular case.
In the original question — what’s the news story all about? If it is about company quarterly earnings, that may never count as “marketing.” Unless your definition includes stock sales as being related to marketing.
Yesterday Coke announced, in Toronto, Blak, with a giant PR stunt. (body painting models in the colors of the bottles) One paper ran it big on the news pages (a marketing dream); two other papers skipped it, and if the PR agency ever calls me back I’m going to ask the people if they sent it to the business pages, because it is a business expansion stock-market related story as much as a consumer “buy this” story.
And, back to the original. If the first time people saw the story was on the web, because they missed that issue of the newspaper, it’s still news to those first-time readers.
Definitions are flexible; just know what the definition means right now, in this case.
BAK
September 17th, 2006 at 2:15 pm
I agree with BAK. In this day and age, it seems that you have to be specific depending on what industry and company you work for, the content of the story, who wrote it and the even the timing of its posting. And maybe, depending on the content and key messages, it’s a PR piece.
A very intriguing question.
Rebecca