A diary voice does not hide an ad

Answer A diary voice does not turn a solo ad into a diary. The FTC's guide on native advertising says an advertisement should be identifiable as an advertisement. If the message is a pitch, the reader should be able to tell. Camouflage is the failure. This note is not legal advice.

The note that started this: Native Advertising: A Guide for Businesses, Federal Trade Commission, December 22, 2015.

Solo ads are already a guest appearance. The reader joined for the list owner. You arrive with an offer. The honest version says so in the first screen. The clever version pretends to be a late-night note from the list owner about their life, and the link at the end is a coincidence. The guide, released with the Commission's policy statement on December 22, 2015, is about that camouflage. It is not a new July rule. It is the rule the swipe file keeps forgetting.

The staff guidance is plain. Transparency is the watchword. An ad should not suggest it is anything other than an ad. If a disclosure is needed so people can tell, the disclosure has to be clear and prominent. The test is performance. Do consumers recognize the ad as an ad? A format that borrows the look of editorial, or of a personal letter, and hides the commercial nature, is the format the document is worried about.

Does a personal story make a solo ad something other than an ad?

No. The FTC's native advertising guide says an advertisement should not suggest it is anything other than an ad. A diary voice that hides the commercial nature is the problem the guide describes.

Stories are allowed. Payment is allowed. The lie is the costume. If you were paid, or you are about to be paid, or you earn when the reader clicks, the message is commercial. Writing it as a confession does not change the incentive. It changes whether the reader can judge the incentive. The guide's point is that people should be able to decide what weight to give the message. They cannot do that if the message pretends to be a friend thinking out loud.

List owners get this wrong in both directions. Some hide the buyer's offer inside their own voice so the email will not look like a sponsor spot. Some buyers demand that hide, because they think a sponsor spot will not get the click. Both moves spend the reader's trust, which is the only asset on a solo. Buy solo ads that can stand being seen as ads. If the offer dies the moment it is labeled, the offer was the label's enemy.

• The message says it is a pitch, in words a person uses.
• The from-name is not borrowed to fake a private note.
• A paid relationship is visible in the message that contains the pitch.
• The link is identifiable as the offer, not as a footnote to a story.

Where should the commercial nature be clear?

It should be clear in the message itself, in plain language a reader will notice. A disclosure that readers miss does not count, because the guide measures the disclosure by whether people recognize the ad as an ad.

The guide's own examples of clear disclosures ask for plain language, proximity, and a presentation people can actually see. A hashtag buried under thirty other tags is not that. A line of gray type under an image-only letter is not that. The words advertisement, ad, and sponsored are ordinary because they work. Use one where the reader is still reading, not where the eye gives up.

Email has a subject line, a preheader, and a first sentence. Those are the places a disguise does its work. If all three sound like a personal crisis and the fourth screen is a checkout, you built a disguise. Rewrite the first sentence until a stranger would call the message an ad without your help.

Is a solo ad to an opted-in list exempt from this?

No. A list that asked for mail can still be misled about whether a particular message is a pitch. This note is not legal advice. Identify the ad in the ad.

Opt-in is about whether you may send. Identification is about what this send is. A reader can want the list and still deserve to know that today's note is a paid offer from a guest. The list relationship does not convert every message into editorial. It makes the disguise worse, because the reader has more reason to believe the voice.

Read the FTC guide and get advice if your format is clever. Clever is the risk. The desk version is short. If it is an ad, say so where the ad is. A diary that exists to sell is a diary with a job. Name the job.