Author Mara Einstein describes how advertising has evolved from identifiable forms like newspaper ads and TV commercials to increasingly more insidious forms such as product placement and crypto ads that masquerade as news stories. The blurring of news and ads is particularly troubling because it is a major departure from the traditional motive of journalists to keep the public informed about real events. When the purpose of news stories is to sell something, the news is degraded into a confusing form of marketing that authentic news outlets must compete with for our attention.

Also covered here are covert types of Internet marketing that make use of cookies and trackers, click-bait teasers that open the gates to more ads, cookies, and trackers, the use of big data to analyze and target people individually for marketing purposes. Many excellent examples of these devices are provided.

Einstein is properly concerned with the issue of how the relentless exposure to hidden marketing mechanisms can transform us from compassionate individuals connected to friends, family, the environment, and other worthy causes into shallow brand-addicted mega-consumers. Her background is itself in marketing, so this enables her to be up-to-date on the latest developments in latent marketing. Yet at times this same background sometimes seems to prevent her from making a clean break with her field. She admires certain clever ads that seem benign and says we should all opt for a world in which ads support the delivery of media rather than one in
which we pay un-affordable prices for content. Yet the success of Netflix's pay-for-content model contradicts this premise. Consumer Reports does not accept ads and offers a reasonable pricing, as did Mad Magazine for many years. Adbusters and Highlights, a children's magazine, similarly do not accept ads and the Atlantic is experimenting with an ad-free version. I would have liked to see a more thorough examination of possible
alternative ad-free worlds, for example one in which revenue-neutral advertising taxes were used to fund media outlets untainted by advertisers and their money. That aside, this is an important eye-opening book that follows a trend that threatens to become even more pernicious than it already is. ( )

Marketers are behind a lot of the content you see online, and many consumers don’t know it. In general, I’m less concerned by this than Einstein is, unless there are false factual claims being made—the creation of cool is a phenomenon of capitalism, and while I believe in sponsorship disclosure I’m not sure that Kim Kardashian’s Instagram, if it has disclosures, is meaningfully different from TV ads. Privacy is a real concern too, but solutions remain fuzzy—the “right to be forgotten” doesn’t really deal with the issue of advertisers following you around the internet to market to you in super-specialized ways. Einstein also links changes in media funding and consumption to the decline of real news; this concern is certainly valid, but it’s not clear how anyone can deal with it, other than (1) paying for news and (2) donating to nonprofits like ProPublica that do the kind of journalism that Buzzfeed won’t. ( )