Beyond clickbait and commerce

Denis Muller
Case study 3: Mamamia
In 2007, an Australian journalist and author, Mia Freedman,
founded the Mamamia website targeted at women. In the seven
years to 2014, it built an audience, engaged with it and made
a profit. Native advertising was a critical factor in its success.
Freedman calls it integrated content and it is written by the editorial
staff. Freedman is quoted as saying: ‘We know how to engage.
And it does work. Where it can go wrong is when clients come
in here thinking they want to do this and they want to do that,
and we are, like, look, we know how to engage women online.
Leave it to us.’ Clearly, then, at Mamamia the staff and publisher
take ownership of, as well as creative responsibility for, the native
advertising project.
An academic analysis of the Mamamia project (Cowcher-Guthrie
2014) found that native advertising, written by Mamamia writers
but sponsored by advertisers, made frequent appearances on the
website and on social media. She found that while the native
advertisements took on the tone and voice of Mamamia editorial
content, they were, in fact, about products that advertising clients
were paying to promote.
Whilst some of this material was disclosed as ‘integrated content’,
the disclosure was not always prominent. In several cases it appeared
only after the second paragraph of what looked like a genuine (i.e.
non-sponsored) editorial item. Cowcher-Guthrie also found that
on social media, advertisements were completely disguised, with
sponsored posts appearing on Facebook and Twitter with links that
were not labelled as sponsored content yet which were identical
to links to non-sponsored items. She found that the language and
topics of the sponsored articles so closely resembled non-sponsored
content that, without the labelling, it would be almost impossible
to distinguish one from the other.
In one particular example, content that purported to be nonsponsored
editorial content, in fact, exhibited the promotional
characteristics of native advertising and straight public relations
material. The item concerned the Dove range of products and
Dove’s Real Beauty campaign. As Cowcher-Guthrie described it,
Real Beauty was modelled on the feminist notion that women
ought not be valued principally on the basis of their weight and
appearance. Dove was an advertiser on Mamamia and its bodyimage-complex
commodification of feminism reinforced the
Mamamia brand of feminism that, according to the researcher’s
interpretation, paid lip service to feminist issues such as women’s
representation in advertising and media, but did not question or
critique structural inequalities.
104 Copyright 2016-2/3. Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. All rights reserved. Vol 13, No 2/3 2016