Do you know the difference between an advertisement and an editorial story?
Sometimes ads are as clear as day but other times it can be confusing, especially when it resembles other stories in a magazine, website content or blog post.
Magazines will usually (because they have to) put the word "Advertisement" or "Advertorial" or "Sponsored" at the top of the page when the ad looks like an editorial story, but it's not that clear on some websites.
For example, a Dedicated Email fro Daily Candy is an email paid for by an advertiser. A *sp may mean sponsored in a Facebook posting or Twitter tweet. And in fact a number of sites charge people to be part of their vendor directories - even though they may be screened, they're still paying to be part of the listing.
The reasons I'm sharing this is because I'm annoyed that not every site makes this clear.
It's important as a consumer that you are aware what's editorial - there because an editor really believes in or likes a product/service - and what is paid editorial aka an advertisement.
Nothing happened specifically that made me want to write this post. I just thought it was important after hearing the confusion for the umpteenth time today.
And for full disclosure purposes, I don't accept advertisements on this blog because I don't want there to be any appearance of impropriety at this site or at my day job as a wedding editor.
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