Advertisers Get Moral High Ground… For Once
Thanks, Bill.
Whenever I’m feeling a little too chipper about a campaign, I put on Bill Hicks. Bill brings me crashing back down to earth with a hit of righteous indignation about what I do. I’m reminded that I don’t add much value to the world. But we all know we’ve pushed products or services that probably deserved to fail… but we gotta pay the bills, right?
But rejoice, fellow marketing professionals! If you subscribe to Bob Hoffman’s newsletter, you may have come across an Oxford Uni study titled: Follow the Money: How the Online Advertising Ecosystem Funds COVID-19 Junk News and Disinformation. It seems we’re not so bad after all.
The study showed how less-than-reputable news publishers are succeeding not in spite of search engines, but because of them. How? By using top-tier SEO strategies. In particular, the fake news sites have used what any sensible person would see as bad publicity to improve ranking.
I’m talking, of course, about backlinking. Sites with high domain authority (including Harvard, Oxford University, and .gov sites) have linked to fake news publishers. To be clear, many of these institutions are referencing past research/info regarding fake news. But it appears Google can’t account for all-important context; Harvard is pointing to this site as an untrustworthy source of information, but Google can’t doesn’t understand that. So when the site publishes misinformation about COVID-19, Google sees a Harvard backlink from 2017 and decides this info will get clicks (money): page 1 it is.
Similarly, the study showed that website markup is often better on the fake news websites than their reputable counterparts. They’ve got some smart SEO strategies, and they’re actively pushing content that generates clicks. Again, for Google, that’s value ($£€$£€$£€!!!).
So what about content professionals? Well, there’s built-in skepticism about what we do; our audience knows our intention, which means we have to work extremely hard to gain their trust. Any content we push out must provide value to a very specific group of potential customers — which means well researched, referenced information. There are legal standards that we have to abide by too. Then there are brand values — currently geared towards social justice (however problematic it is to coattail, at least it means we’re not lending SEO value to fake news sites). By no means does this description account for everyone, but it’s a general trend.
OK, back to reality: we’re no saints. People in our industry are still finding ways to push out dangerous products with clever marketing. But it’s not often we get to point the finger, so let’s enjoy this brief moment of moral superiority(parity) with big tech.