Medusa native advertising. How to work with native advertising - the Meduza method

Course from the OM media school in St. Petersburg on how to advertise in the media. About how to tell stories together with advertisers - and how to make them effective for the customer and useful and interesting for the reader. The course consists of a theoretical part and a practical part.

Theory: - Working with briefs: how to understand what the customer needs - Formats: how to choose correct form for history and what mistakes lead to - Evaluating effectiveness: how to make a client happy - Ethics: how not to deceive readers and not destroy the editors

Practice: Working with briefs, discussing ideas, creating a project in a group and analyzing it in detail.

What you will get as a result: - You will learn about native advertising and its types; - Understand the advantages and disadvantages of native advertising over conventional advertising; - Study the creation process both from the customer’s side and from the publication’s side; - Learn to work with advertising briefs; - Understand native advertising formats; - Create your own case and defend it to the author;

Who is this course for: - Marketers and PR specialists who want to learn more about working with native advertising; - Owners and business representatives who want to master new tools for promoting their product; - Media employees; - Publishers and journalists planning to work with native advertising in their media; - Those who are considering working on a direction and want to learn more about the native.

Schedule

12:30 - 13:00 How to tell a story? History is at the heart of the material. How does dry information become interesting to anyone? The difference between a journalistic approach to information and an advertising one.

12:30 - 13:30 Who is involved in the creation of native advertising and how? Process of creation. Advertiser - publisher - reader. Not obvious, but obligatory participants.

15:00 - 16:00 How to clearly set the task for the performer? Statement of the task Goal, emotions, brand presence. Brand values. Drawing up an advertising brief. Stages of approval.

16:00 - 16:30 How to choose the appropriate format? Native formats. What determines the choice of format? Text, video, photo, game. Answers to questions, tests, collections, instructions, stories, gifs.

16:30 - 17:00 How to integrate ready-made material into your media? Place of native advertising in page layout. Content distribution.

17:00: - 17:30 - Installation task

11:00 - 12:00 How to measure the effectiveness of native advertising? Efficiency parameters and how they differ from standard ones. Editorial metrics, audience reach, engagement, conversions. Unobvious parameters.

15:00 Presentation and defense of projects. Results.

Added 12/29/2015

What is a “native advertising format”?

Native advertising is the use of advertising materials as editorial and vice versa. In simple words speaking, native advertising is advertising in the form of material on a website, usually an article. It is this type of advertising that is now most popular in the West, and is what The New York Times uses. Why?

• Native advertising is very effective. Users have already developed banner blindness: they do not see not only classic banners, but also pop-up windows. Despite the fact that banner advertising has become very interactive and unusual (advertising that follows the mouse pointer no longer surprises anyone), sometimes with video effects and sound, it still lacks much attention. Website users know very well where not to look so as not to waste their time.
• Native advertising is completely inexpensive to produce. As a rule, the same tools are used as for creating some kind of editorial materials.
• Advertising is cross-platform. You don't have to worry about how exactly your advertising material is displayed on mobile phones and tablets. You always know that it is displayed exactly the same as all your materials.
• You simply cannot block native advertising. Today, the vast majority of users are familiar with Adblock, and the number and share of such users is only growing. For obvious reasons, native advertising cannot be “blocked”.
• Such advertising does not irritate the reader at all. According to the editor of Meduza, they receive dozens of letters every month asking why there are no advertisements on Meduza. And it is there - right on the main page.
• And, of course, we should not forget that native advertising is material that can also be readable and interesting to the user.

The challenges of native advertising

The first is that sites offering native advertising charge too much money for placement. Moreover, many sites are trying to sell native advertising as separate special projects, and they ask for appropriate budgets. However, it is almost impossible to put such advertising on a stream, since you can only put on a stream something that shows excellent results for little money.

The second reason is that many people do not know how to cook this dish. Historically, in the media, advertising is separate, and materials are separate. Native advertising is native not just when it looks visually the same, but when it goes in the feed with all other materials, and the intonation inside the advertising materials should be exactly the same.

Otherwise, no one will read your advertisement, and it will not make sense for the advertiser. But what to do if advertising materials are not readable? This means that you submit such materials separately from the main content of your resource. Often, advertising is carried out by individual people who are not directly connected with the site itself. As a result, we get another editorial team, a separate team that produces exclusively advertising materials. And this is wrong.

To start

To start advertising materials, you need several large and high-profile cases that brought big profits to employers. After this, trust both in the format of such advertising and in your project itself will increase, and new advertisers will join in.

Your site will bear the same responsibility for advertising materials as for any others. Moreover, we are not talking about the legal side of the issue at all, but exclusively about reputational costs. Writing well about dubious business is a path to the abyss. In addition, you need to double-check all the information that the advertiser offers you so as not to write outright lies. And the advertisers themselves must be selected very carefully. If in the process of writing advertising material you realize that you are forced to write lies, then it is better to refuse such material.

Meduza, by the way, has two formats of advertising materials. The first is entertainment content in which the advertised brand is simply mentioned, acting as a sponsor. There is quite a lot of freedom of action here, you can do anything and however you want, the way you are used to. The second format of advertising materials involves detailed description product or service of the advertiser, and this requires very scrupulous work. It is necessary to write the material so that it is interesting to the audience, and so that the advertised brand is positively remembered. Writing about something that you yourself are not sure about, that you are “floating” in, and even more so openly lying, is practically suicide.

Native advertising is a bad place to experiment. It is better to use the format of materials to which you and your audience are accustomed and which evokes the greatest response. If your infographics are popular, use them. If review materials are popular, then use reviews as a “working advertising format.” If there is no ready-made format for such an advertiser, then the format should be invented; but this must be done with the expectation that in the future this format will also be used as an editorial format. Nothing is wasted. In addition, trying to “stretch” advertising material to fit the format of existing ones will look pathetic, like Hachiko.

Rules of the game

Meduza has created internal rules according to which editorial material is separated from advertising: different types materials must not refer to each other or affect other materials in any way. In addition, the reader must understand which post is advertising and which is not. Otherwise, the visitor will feel deceived, and trust in the site will drop sharply.

What is native advertising

This is the use of editorial formats for advertising purposes. And vice versa: advertising formats can turn into editorial ones. This is the type of advertising that the American media is now obsessed with (from Buzzfeed to The New York Times). And there are several reasons for this:

1. She is effective. Unlike banners. To attract attention, banners are constantly increasing in size, becoming interactive, collapsing, moving apart, with video and sounds. The reader develops immunity. The first banner in the history of the Internet in 1994 said: “Have you ever clicked here? You will click” - and it was true. Everyone clicked. Nowadays, readers don’t even notice moving half-screen banners. And then there is Google Adsense, Yandex.Direct, Facebook and other platforms with an unlimited audience. And no publication can compete with them.
2. It is inexpensive and quick to produce. In most cases, you use something that has already been developed for editorial needs.
3. This is a cross-platform format. Humanity solves the problem of monetization mobile platforms, with a native, in principle, such a question does not arise - it does not matter to you where you read such an article: on the website, in the application or in Facebook Instant Articles.
4. She is not afraid of Adblock. On media sites, up to 50% of readers use a banner blocker. The native is not blocked.
5. This is the most non-irritating format for the reader. Verified. We constantly answer the question “Why is there almost no advertising on Meduza?” when there are six tagged advertising materials on the main page at the same time.
6. This is additional traffic. Banners are designed like this: the more traffic you have, the more banners you can sell (to be very crude) - the native brings traffic on its own. And quite a big one. We've had promotional materials get 140,000 views. And we also made money from them.

Native Meduza projects collected

This is all great. The problem is that almost no one knows how to do this. There are at least two reasons:

1. Raising prices. The good thing about Native is that it is inexpensive. But many sites, having seen new format, they decide to cheat and sell the native as separate special projects - and for the appropriate money. But the new format cannot be expensive - otherwise it will not be put into production. Flow can occur when you show serious results for little money.
2. Wrong sales. This is, in fact, the most important thing. Advertising in most publications exists as a necessary - but forced - addition to the publication. This is a separate closed corner, living by its own laws and having a rather indirect relationship to the publication. But when we talk about the use of editorial formats, we mean not only that advertising copies, say, cards or articles, but that the intonation of these materials should be in tune with the publication. And another thing is that advertising materials should be treated with no less reverence than editorial content.

This is an Airbnb co-op game built on GeoGuessr mechanics. The reader was shown a real photo of a home available for rent on Airbnb and asked to find it on a Google map

How to make native advertising read

The second point is so important that we need to write about it in more detail. What is the problem? You sell editorial formats, but you make them separate from the newsroom. If you do this automatically, leave it to a completely autonomous special projects department (in fact, another editorial office), then you will get an editorial staff within the editorial office, living its own life and producing materials that are completely uninteresting to the readers of the publication. And readers do not come to the publication for advertising.

Joint game with McDonalds “Do you know the geography of Russia? " - one of the most successful projects of Meduza (more than 2000 likes, for example). Each successful case leads to new requests from advertisers

During the time that we have been doing native advertising (this experience is short-lived, a little more than six months, but effective: now we launch five to ten native projects a week, in addition, we have five projects that stretch over several months), we understood a few important rules native:

1. You need your first few high-profile successful cases. After this they begin to trust you. This is very important both for attracting clients and for further approvals.
2. You bear the same responsibility to the reader for published advertising materials as for editorial materials. And we are not talking about the legal side, but about the reputational side. If your texts marked as native advertising contain untruths (or not the whole truth), this is very bad. If you talk about dubious clients as good advertisers, this is very bad. That is:
   a) advertising also needs a fact check;
   b) you need to be very careful when choosing advertisers.
   We were wrong on both point a and point b. And learned from mistakes. But these mistakes could not be made. It happens that in the process of writing a material you realize that you cannot work with such an advertiser for ethical reasons. Return the money.
3. Divide your formats into two types. The first is entertainment formats that do not directly describe the brand or product being advertised. Such formats are not very risky in terms of reputation, since the advertiser here actually acts as a sponsor of the material. The second type of format is when you seriously describe the advertised product. Here the level of your freedom is extremely small, and advertising something you don’t believe in and being disingenuous is like death. Such formats can only be offered to very trusted companies whose services you are confident in. Through trial and error, we established a rule: the topic of any such material is approved by the deputy editor-in-chief, who is no longer involved in the creation of advertising materials.
4. Have 20 ideas in reserve that you can unexpectedly pull out of your sleeve.
5. When coming up with an idea, try to use those formats that already exist and have been verified by the editors. And not only because it will be easier to do. If the editors constantly use a certain format, it means it works. Coming up with dead formats for advertising means working in vain and doing ineffective things.
6. If there is no suitable format, come up with a new one. But come up with it so that the editors can use it later. This is useful for two reasons: firstly, nothing is wasted - you get new tools for development for the advertiser’s money. Secondly, with this approach you won't come up with meaningless crap. Example: the Jellyfish games originally came out of advertising ideas. We don't use game formats multiple times very often, but every a new game- this is testing and thinking through new mechanics, this is a new experience in creating news games. The most popular material in the history of Meduza, the game “Tell Your Fortune on Brodsky,” was originally invented as an advertising project, but did not sell (bite your elbows, dear advertisers: 400,000 views and more than 1,000,000 fortunes generated).
7. The most important. Treat advertising like your own. This, of course, does not mean that the authors and editors of the publication should love or at least somehow focus on advertisers. In no case. But you need to build a system where your promotional content is just as proud as your editorial content. It's very complex and dangerous moment, since it affects the most sacred thing in quality media - the concept of the wall between the advertising department and the editorial office. And changes it (that such changes are required has been written even in internal research The New York Times). Your task is to change the wall without destroying it.

Cards have been incredibly successful as an advertising format (because they explain complex things in a simple way), but of all advertising formats, this is the most dangerous, because when you make a card, you have to be sure that you are right

How should the wall between advertising and editorial be constructed if you sell native advertising?

What is a wall

This is the basic rule that determines the relationship between the advertising department and the editorial team in any self-respecting publication. The wall implies that editorial and advertising live in different worlds. The author does not think about the existence of advertising, the editor does not think about the existence of advertising, the editor-in-chief knows the advertising director, but does not take into account what advertising is placed in the publication. The only person who knows about advertising but is not in the advertising department is the publisher.

The advertising department does not know about the materials published in the publication and, accordingly, cannot influence them in any way. Any conflict situations are resolved at the level of publisher - editor-in-chief - commercial director and cannot in any way influence the life of the editorial office. The last word in any conflict lies with the editor-in-chief.

What's wrong with this

This is all true with one exception: native advertising requires significantly more editorial expertise. In essence, it is necessary to strengthen the advertising part of the publication with editorial expertise, without changing the editorial policy of the publication. To do this, you will have to string several wires through the wall, transmitting the signal in one direction: from the editorial office to advertising.

How to do it

First a disclaimer:

1. These are our rules, we came up with them for ourselves and are not at all sure that they will suit anyone else.
2. The rules are built on trust. We trust our editors and know that they will not deal with jeans and custom clothing.
3. We are a small editorial office. We are not at all sure that such rules are possible in a large publication.
4. Special correspondents have nothing to do with advertising.

Now the rules:

1. Advertising materials must be created within the editorial office. There should be several people in the editorial office who know how to come up with ideas for advertising briefs - but they are not interested in this financially. In our case, regular (almost daily) short meetings serve this purpose. Coming up with ideas doesn’t bring any professional aberration into the lives of editors: “it’s just an interesting activity, you don’t owe anyone anything.
2. The number of people in the editorial office related to the creation of advertising should be strictly limited and kept to a minimum. Two or three people, no more. The rest of the editorial staff should be protected from advertising.
3. These people must have extensive experience as a journalist and editor, they must very clearly understand what it is professional ethics journalist, and strictly adhere to it.
4. They must not have a conflict of interest. In Meduza there is no assignment by topic, so a situation where an editor involved in the banking sector makes advertisements for banks cannot, in principle, arise. However, cases of overlapping topics may arise. All this must be checked before the editor takes the material into work. If there is even a hint of a conflict of interest, the decision is made in favor of the interests of the editors.
5. Chief Editor and the deputy editor-in-chief do not participate in the creation of advertising and are the guarantors that in any controversial situation a decision will be made that protects the independence and objectivity of the editorial office.
6. Complex materials should be reviewed by non-advertising editors. The editor should not have any connections with the advertiser and should not participate in the coordination of the material with the advertiser - on the contrary, he is a person from the editorial side, a defender of its interests and an impartial judge of the text.

The bottom line: your task is to transfer the editorial expertise to advertising without spoiling the editorial office. There are obviously many more laws in this matter than described above, and in six months we will probably be able to write a couple more.

The joint project with Tinkoff Bank will last almost six months - more than a dozen materials will be released as part of it

What to call it

You need to come up with general rules games that give the reader a clear understanding that the material was written for the advertiser’s money. That is, the reader, seeing the material, understands that it is different from the rest. Opening it, he sees it again. And we remind him when he finishes reading it.

These rules cannot be changed at the request of the advertiser. Essentially, these are our guidelines from which we cannot deviate.

is that enough? After participating in a dozen disputes, we realized that no, it’s not enough. Therefore, in the near future we will introduce new, stricter rules regarding how native advertising looks on Meduza.

Ilya, as far as I remember, you were one of the first to talk about native advertising. It seems that the term itself appeared thanks to Meduza’s projects. Is it so?

Hardly. We just shout about him the loudest. In general, native advertising can mean completely different things. For us, native advertising is the use of editorial formats for advertising purposes. At the same time, if we come up with a new format in advertising, then it can also be used in the editorial office.

Advertising on Facebook, for example, is structured according to the native principle—the space of a standard post is used for advertising, and the user is the brand. Quite funny collisions arise. Let's say there is an advertisement on Instagram - that is, a banner image. Only this is not a banner, this is already a native advertisement, because in order to place this picture, a standard position for Instagram is used - a picture published by the user.

Are there any other online publications (namely publications, not social networks) that use native advertising?

Now this is becoming almost universal. There are a number of publications with which we somehow overlap all the time - vc.ru, lifehacker.ru. Look At Media. They didn't really call it native advertising until recently. They called it special projects, which were done according to a slightly different principle since 2008, and maybe even earlier.

How did you come to this format at Meduza?

By trial and error. We experiment, and we begin to develop the things that we succeed. When we launched, it was clear that we needed to make money. We started trying everything under the sun and this is what worked. Then we looked around and saw that similar things were already happening all over the world. And it starts to work for a large number of reasons, for example, because other types of advertising on the Internet are losing their effectiveness. Secondly, because we compete with everyone in the world - Facebook, Yandex or Google are exactly the same as our competitors, like other publications. Now everyone has learned to measure efficiency, and in this sense, it’s not that we are not competitive, we just have completely different volumes, so we cannot sell as cheaply as Facebook sells. What we really know how to do is tell stories. This is our competitive advantage.

Just like everywhere else. You have made the material, it will have some coverage, and it is clear how much it will cost you. One way or another, everyone determines how much different metrics have changed after the release of the material - brand awareness, sales, virality. It's different for everyone.

How do users react to native advertising? They don't associate it with "jeans"?

Jeans are a custom material without advertising marks. Native advertising is when we, as an agency, together with a brand, do something that is useful and interesting to readers. And we warn the reader that this material was made together with a partner, and the partner paid us for it. We make sure that the user sees this message wherever he encounters this content - on social networks, on the main page of Meduza, in the material itself - at the beginning and at the end.

In general, we protect the interests of readers, this is the most important thing for us. Our task is to make sure that the fact that we were paid for some project makes the reader feel better, not worse. With the help of advertisers' money, we create something that will be necessary and useful for the reader, or simply interesting and fun, or will make a strong impression on him. We want the reader to benefit from advertising.

We have quite active readers, they actively react to our projects, sometimes they thank us, and there are situations when we did something not completely accurately, and these inaccuracies are pointed out to us.

In fact, the requirements for advertising materials are sometimes even higher than for editorial content, because when people see that it is advertising, they are some kind of guardians of ethics, honesty, and so on. Therefore, we feel a responsibility to our readers; they are our ethical commission.

They are difficult to take. My experience is that doing such things with people who do not have journalistic skills and editorial experience is very difficult. These should be people who understand how the editorial office works, these are not advertisers. Their task is to make something that will be useful to the reader, the publication, and the advertiser.

Of course, a huge number of people are involved in this - the commercial department, designers, developers, myself. But, first of all, there is a native advertising editor who orders texts and manages the project, coordinates with the advertiser, and tries to ensure that after approval the material becomes better, not worse.

Does Meduza currently have a large department dedicated to native advertising?

We have a commercial department, there are 5 or 6 people in it, 2 advertising editors, I do this all the time, another person and I come up with ideas. Plus, one or two designers and several technical contractors are involved in this.

I have no idea. We solve problems as they arise. Now we see that native advertising is growing. At the same time, the worst thing that can happen to any publication is that it will stop experimenting and start using only established schemes. Our task is to experiment all the time and turn these experiments into new formats.

Now I don't see any ceiling. Why am I interested in doing native advertising - because it improves quality. Great amount advertising is done for no apparent reason, it’s annoying, it costs a lot of money, and so on. I like to make advertising that everyone wants. And this very often turns out to be possible. I don’t know what will happen in the future. It seems to me that formats will change, but the idea will not suffer from this.

Now publications are taking on the role of agencies: they are learning to do everything - from idea to implementation. And the more of these functions the publication takes on, the more it has competitive advantages. But it is obvious that agencies will not die anyway, they will just need to learn how to effectively cooperate with publications.

For us they already work differently. Of course, the advertising department should then delve much deeper into what the publication does. I have often encountered a situation where an advertising manager does not understand at all what this publication is about, does not read it, and does not like it.

We talk about this all the time, but it only works when the people who come up with the publication talk to the advertising department and explain what we are doing and why.

How to prepare people to work in native advertising?

Only in practice, it doesn’t happen any other way. In general, everything related to media can only be learned through practice. Theory plays a very dubious role here. There is little of it, and it is specific in each edition. You can watch what others do and apply some of it to yourself, but one way or another, there is no recipe.

Can you give examples of successful Western projects?

We had the coolest analogues at the Storm conference; there is a T Brand Studio that does native advertising for The New York Times. There's The Buzzfeed. The Atlantic is doing amazing things... In fact, almost everyone in America is already doing this. In many publications, native advertising accounts for 50 to 80% of revenue.

It turns out that the media format itself is changing - advertising is given a larger percentage of space than editorial materials themselves?

How does this follow from my words? No, if you give more space to advertising than editorial content, people will stop reading you. But it is clear that all this greatly affects the media. It's actually quite dangerous process, it can lead to the fact that, firstly, the credibility of the publication is undermined, and secondly, the reader ceases to understand what kind of material is in front of him. Now an open debatable question is how to mark native advertising so that the reader does not get disoriented?

In America, last December, they released a huge document telling how to tag native advertising so as not to frustrate readers. A study was recently carried out in which all publications were checked. It turned out that only 9% fully comply with the requirements, and another 10-20% do not pass at all. And therefore it is doubly important to do such advertising with high quality.

Storytelling is our superweapon. Let's use it for peaceful purposes.

Interviewed by Maria Kigel

In his blog on Medium, a note about how the publication works with native advertising and what principles it is guided by. We publish the material with the permission of the authors.

A few introductory notes:

1. On May 21, we held a conference in Moscow about native advertising, there were the best of the world From this area, I would like to draw several conclusions based on the results.
2. There is more and more native advertising in Russia. Sometimes it's great, sometimes it's very bad. Unfortunately, there are already a lot of very bad native advertising, which means that dangers await us. The main ones are: undermining trust in editors (on the part of readers) and the real destruction of the “editorial wall” (between the editorial office and commerce).
3. We have been doing native advertising for a year now. We love to step on our own rake. Thanks to this, we understood something about native advertising. Our experience may be useful to other publications already involved in native advertising — or just thinking about it.
4. Watch the video. He’s very funny, but jokes aside — what’s happening now is a massive process leading to tectonic shifts in the world of media. We need to be aware of this. The video is already two years old, that is, the process has been going on for a long time.

Now the principles

1. Native advertising — not really precise definition for what we do. Native advertising is when a site uses non-advertising formats for advertising purposes. This includes advertising on Instagram and Facebook, and a billion other things. In the case of media, native advertising is primarily a way of announcing materials, within the publication itself or on its social networks. It is more correct to call advertising itself “sponsored content.” Both words are important: this is sponsored content.

2. The main goal of sponsored content is to make things better for both the advertiser, the publication, and the reader.

3. It directly follows from this that any material should be somehow useful to the reader, give him tools, entertain him. Accordingly, native advertising editors defend the interests of readers to the advertiser, not forgetting the interests of advertisers.

4. For any brief proposed by the advertiser, the publication must find a solution that will not mislead the reader. You can follow the path of entertainment, or you can follow the path of useful Everyday life, you can use the associative series and come up with a parallel story, you can use the expertise of the advertiser and use it to tell a story that is important to everyone. If there is no solution, the advertiser should refuse.

5. All projects of advertisers must be checked for cleanliness; This is especially true for complex segments (medicine and pharmacology, charity, financial, educational and legal services, real estate). Each according to their own criteria (for example, in the case of pharmacology we are interested in clinical researches drugs; and in the case of legal services- Oddly enough, their legality). If the advertiser does not pass the verification, he should be rejected. If the advertiser passes the test, but some unpleasant details are revealed during the creation of the material, the material will have to be canceled and the money returned to the client. The one who makes native advertising is responsible for the quality of what he advertises; which means the publication’s reputation is at stake.

6. The native advertising department uses the same methods (formats) of storytelling as the editorial team. First of all, this concerns new formats: their use in both journalistic and sponsorship projects ensures the integrity of the product and guarantees the preservation of editorial intonation. Moreover, when no editorial format is suitable for an advertising project, it is necessary to come up with a format that the editorial office can use in the future. This is how native advertising benefits the editors.

7. Any sponsored content must be marked wherever it appears: in the announcement of the material on the main page, in social network accounts, in the material itself. The marks must be identical and continuous; They cannot not only be deleted, but also adjusted at the request of advertisers. The reader must clearly understand that this is material made for the advertiser’s money.

8. Is it possible to create sponsored content without receiving editorial review? No. Obtaining knowledge can be arranged as follows:

• The editorial office has one liaison who participates in coming up with advertising materials (but not in creating materials), passing on editorial knowledge, ensuring the quality of topics and the same intonation in coming up with topics and formats. At Meduza, such a person is called the editor of new formats.
• Editorial staff may provide advice to editors of sponsored content.
• Editorial staff can fact-check stories that have already been written — to ensure the quality of the result and to avoid misleading the reader.

9. The editors cannot participate in the creation of sponsored content. Is there an exception to this rule? Yes, subject to three important conditions.

Condition No. 1. In some situations, you can order material from an editor — so that the editor knows it’s an advertisement, but doesn’t know for whom. Thus, journalistic work does not change in any way: the author does not come into contact with the advertiser, the material itself is created without taking into account the advertiser and according to all editorial canons. Example: the Garage Museum orders a test about Moscow Conceptualism. The editors have an author who is well versed in Moscow conceptualism. If the author makes a test about Moscow conceptualism, without knowing anything about the advertiser (but knowing that the material is advertising), no aberrations arise.

Condition No. 2. The order of advertising material for an editorial employee must be agreed upon with the editor-in-chief, who must make sure that there is no conflict of interest even on the horizon (and, of course, an author from the editorial office cannot be forced to write advertising materials).

Condition No. 3. Ordering texts from within the editorial office is an extraordinary, exceptional decision. Not a constant practice.

If these conditions cannot be met, do native advertising using the advertising department and freelancers. Don't touch the editor.

10. The rule about ignorance of the advertiser also applies to invited authors. From this knowledge, the author can subconsciously adjust the text to the advertiser’s requirements unknown to him, which spoils the quality of the text and creates the ground for a possible conflict of interest.

11. Sponsored content cannot place the publication on any side in any conflict. Never and under no circumstances: conflict situation may be a reason for a journalistic text, but not for an advertising one. It can also be formulated this way: if a bad article was published about an advertiser in some publication (for example, in yours), you cannot use his money to make an article that whitewashes the advertiser (or denigrates a competitor). Therefore, point 5 (about checking for cleanliness) is very important.

12. Absolute editorial dictates must be established with respect to sponsored content. This means that everything complex materials(from the design stage to the release stage) must be approved by the editors and, in case of refusal, cancelled. This is the responsibility of either the editor-in-chief (this is how we work now) or a special person responsible for standards (this is how it works in The New York Times). The editor-in-chief can cancel any advertising project at any stage, even after publication.