Paddy Manning was wrong – in defence of advertorials

There’s nothing unethical about advertorials, argues Clare McCausland in a post first published on The Conversation

RMIT professor Sinclair Davidson has recently defended the actions of journalist Paddy Manning, who was dismissed from Fairfax after writing an article in Crikey critical of what he called “advertorial creep” in the Australian Financial Review. Manning was particularly scathing of a recent advertorial run by the AFR sponsored by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

Manning’s “suicide mission” appears to have worked though: the Commonwealth Bank’s sponsorship of the “First Person” column in the AFR has reportedly been pulled.

Yet Fairfax, like many other reputable publications, has been running advertorials for decades. But the transition of the advertorial format online has not been received well. American magazine The Atlantic recently ran into controversy when it introduced sponsored content, even though it used a format (an article identified as sponsored accompanied by display ads) that had been tried and tested in print many thousands of times. What has changed?