Stealth advertising incidents analyzed by UO professors.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

Ahead of an approaching winter storm, a television reporter in a small East Coast city heads for a local discount store to do a story on the kinds of supplies residents will need to ride out the blizzard, ending the piece with a shot of the store and the words `... they've got everything you need for the coming storm.'

News, or advertising? That's the question two University of Oregon journalism professors analyzed in a new study that suggests that the line between the two is continuing to blur in many newscasts, especially those in smaller markets.

UO professor Jim Upshaw and visiting professor David Koranda, along with Canadian professor Gennadiy Chernov, found that 90 percent of the 294 newscasts analyzed had at least one instance per newscast of what has been labeled "stealth advertising." In a study published in the journal Electronic News, they found 750 instances of commercial influences (including the example above), about 2.5 per newscast averaging 1 minute 42 seconds long.

"We got credible indications that these practices that can blur news and advertising more or less openly had increased," Upshaw said. "There certainly was this kind of thing going on in every market."

Stealth advertising isn't a new phrase. It's come to mean any kind of advertising that shows up in unexpected or nontraditional places, and it's becoming more common as new technologies such as TiVo allow more people to fast-forward through ads in their traditional slots in traditional programming.

That's put increasing pressure on broadcasters to find new ways to get messages in front of an audience, pressure that does not stop at the newsroom door, Upshaw said. Stealth advertising has slipped into newscasts in ways both obvious and subtle, from showing advertiser logos on screen during newscasts to running a health news segment sponsored by a local hospital.

What's bothersome about the practice is its potential effect on the level of trust people have for news programming and journalism in general, the researchers said. Upshaw noted that links between advertisers and television news are rarely disclosed.

The research divided commercial influences into four categories: product placement, promotional tone, sponsored segments and news framing of business. They include such practices as placing an advertiser's name or product into a newscast, singling out a particular company for flattering coverage, "billboarding" a company name or logo before and after a news segment the company sponsors and using a legitimate business story to unnecessarily promote a business.

Upshaw and Koranda acknowledged that it's not always obvious whether a particular story is legitimate news or was influenced by an advertiser. It's even harder to know whether a conscious decision was made to use a news segment to reward or court an advertiser.

Their research did not probe the decision-making behind each instance of perceived stealth advertising. And they noted that news directors, while acknowledging increasing pressure from ad departments, almost universally rejected the notion of allowing advertisers to influence news decisions.

On the other hand, they said interviews and research turned up numerous examples of news coming into conflict with advertising. They cited a case in Washington, D.C., in which a bank executive met regularly with a local station's news staff to plan news coverage of the bank. In another, a San Francisco news director adopted "product integration fees" to get advertisers featured in news segments.

The study found that commercial influence was "ubiquitous" across both small and large market newscasts but not only was more frequent in smaller markets but also more conspicuous. That largely reflects the importance of news as a revenue generators in smaller markets, where it can account for 40 percent of a station's ad revenue.

"One thing that still defines what's local about local television is news," Koranda said. "News is almost the last form of locally produced programming in television."

The study did not look at print advertising, but similar dynamics are evident there. Upshaw recalled a series of ads that ran in The Register-Guard beginning last fall in which an image of a hand with index finger extended pushed into the news copy above, a more literal intrusion of ad copy into a news story.

Other newspapers have relented to pressure to run advertisements on their front pages or taken other steps to allow advertising in places traditionally off limits to commercial content.

The study's findings point out how newscasting has changed as both technology and audience expectations have changed.

Upshaw, who was a television journalist for 22 years, noted that it used to be standard practice when doing stories to avoid showing corporate logos, by turning a soda bottle so it faces away from the camera, for example.

"Now the influences are out there, and pretty successful sometimes, in getting that bottle turned toward the camera," he said.