The Seventh Eye online journal, which focuses on the media in Israel, recently exposed collusion between the Ynet news website and the pharmaceutical company that markets the antidepressant drug Cipralex in the production of a series of interviews conducted by journalist Hanoch Daum. Entitled Window to the Soul, the series was comprised of interviews in which celebrities admitted to emotional breakdowns that they had experienced (e.g., actor Dan Toren: “I’ve been writing more since I started taking Cipralex”). Shortly thereafter, Seventh Eye reporter Oren Persico entered the dense jungle of Israel’s leading websites, including Ynet and Walla portal, and returned to report on the strange creatures he found there.

According to Persico's report, the "Home" channel ("Bayit") of the Walla portal is nothing but an advertising platform for the Sano brand of cleaning products. The "Family Financial Growth" section of Ynet’s finance channel, according to his report, is essentially a branch of Bank Hapoalim (actually, it's a mini-version of Channel 2's Overdraft Family, a reality-based television program), and Ynet's health channel has a regular column that seems to be a subsidiary of the drugstorechain Super-Pharm, which includes a forum of the company’s pharmacists, a map of local branches, and articles with recommendations made by those pharmacists.

The scary picture that emerges from Persico’s report raises several issues concerning the presence of “branded content” deals, especially on the Internet. The main outcome of “branded content” deals is that of an ongoing precess of blurring. It is, first and foremost, a blurring process of the traditional distinction between “content” and “advertising.” Added to this are additional types of obfuscation, such as a blurring of the line between journalists and non-journalists (which of the two should Hanoch Daum be considered after his series Window to the Soul?) and between journalistic and non-journalistic content (is the content provided by Ynet’s health channel journalistic content? Is it bound by the ethics of journalism?). As part of this process, the basic distinctions that usually guide media consumers are undermined and become vague. “Branded content” is indeed a confusing concept, and was intended to be so by its creators. Such is the nature of the beast.

The phenomenon of embedded branding, which has flooded television Channels 2 and 10 over the past few years, is alive and kicking on the Internet, where it is even stronger than on television. This is partly due to the catch-all nature of major sites such as Ynet and Walla. Unlike traditional media bodies, which differentiate rather clearly between journalism and other types of content (e.g., television news companies are independent of networks; newspapers separate the news section from other sections and, in any event, are bound by journalistic ethics), the leading websites serve as huge supermarkets, offering everything bundled in one package-breaking news, special features, human interest stories, entertaining video clips, forums, and links to commercial subsidiaries such as online commerce sites.

Walla was designed from the outset to be an all-inclusive portal. But even Ynet, which is primarily a news site, developed, with time, to be far more than that. In the resulting tangle, it is impossible to determine where editorial content ends and where commerce begins, or which standards apply to the content the site offers.

In its defense, Ynet claimed that the brand name Cipralex was not specifically mentioned in several of the prominent video clips that they featured in that series. This ostensibly proved that the site did not engage in surreptitious advertising for the pharmaceutical company that had sponsored the project. This is not an acceptable line of defense. Rather, it serves as proof of the elusive way brands take. Corporations seeking to promote certain brands do not necessarily seek direct exposure of their product or logo. They engage in far more abstract tactics: they promote related issues into the public agenda, encourage lifestyles that dovetail with consumption of their product, and saturate every possible space with their brand’s colors, logo, and font.

In this specific case, the manufacturer of Cipralex was interested in engaging people with questions concerning anxiety and depression. Ynet, the leading news site in Israel, is an excellent platform for that purpose. By the same token, Sano, a manufacturer of cleaning products, would like people to be involved in discussions about home maintenance. In these cases, the brand name is used merely as a frame for content, and is always just a mouse click away, even if consigned to the margins. For this reason, the phenomenon under discussion, both on television and the Internet, should be more correctly termed embedded branding.

The Internet enables more intensive blurring of boundaries between content and advertising than television, and therefore provides fertile soil for embedded branding deals. While television is a linear and passive medium, in which images are broadcast one after another over time - features that support the distinction between content and advertising—the Internet is a simultaneous and interactive medium, which grants a great deal of creative freedom to those interested in obscuring the difference between content and advertising.

Visitors to the Ynet website site thus found themselves on the site’s home page at first, then, with just one click, they were viewing a video clip anchored by Hanoch Daum, and with just another click they were directed to an allegedly “independent” information site about anxiety and depression, which was actually sponsored by the pharmaceutical company. Still another click brought them to an overtly commercial site with the domain name cipralex.co.il. This is a very short path, which sometimes only takes seconds to complete, and there are no prominent warning signs that inform visitors when they are leaving the editorial content zone and crossing into the sponsor’s commercial zone.

Another reason that embedded branding flourishes on the Internet is, of course, the fact that the new media is free of regulation. This feature is, of course, at the heart new media’ success and part of its charm, but it is also what enables the growth of the commercial jungle described by Persico in the Seventh Eye. In its current evolutionary stage, the Internet has no accepted rules of conduct and no clear commitment to ethics or integrity, and the boundaries of its content domains are primarily determined by the websites themselves.

As Persico demonstrated, these boundaries are flexible, constantly changing, without warning. In this context, television channels and especially their regulatory bodies (i.e. the Second Authority for Television and Radio) may carry an important, perhaps historic, role. The rules that will soon be defined in regards to embedded branding deals on television will dictate norms for other media as well and will affect the expectation of viewers; what happens there may eventually serve as the foundation of a code of ethics for websites as well.

One would think that the flourishing of embedded branding deals in websites and on television would, first and foremost, enrage viewers, consumer organizations, regulatory bodies, policy makers, and just about anyone who cares about what we see and hear through these media. In actuality, the phenomenon should be of utmost concern to the people who foster and nurture it: the executives and editors in chief at Ynet and Walla, network executives at Channel 2 and Channel 10, and other senior officials in media bodies. As embedded branding is essentially sly and elusive, they may fail to notice one of its prominent characteristics: its boomerang effect.

When Hanoch Daum convinces a few celebrities to sacrifice their intimacy and privacy and a pharmaceutical company benefits as a result, he tarnishes the image of all other journalists who work at the same website. When Ynet’s home page features video clips subsequently identified as promotional material for a psychiatric drug, it not only undermines the value of the specific series of articles being promoted by the website but also damages the credibility and integrity of all the other content it has to offer, however valuable that content may or may not be.

If Ynet readers start to question the integrity of articles on its health channel, they will eventually become skeptical of reports in the political section. Skeptical web surfers are not ideal consumers; every editor and manager knows that. Such readers are liable to migrate swiftly to another site, one that they deem more trustworthy. After all, at the end of the day, the mere existence of a media body does not depend on its embedded branding deals; it depends primarily on the trust the public ascribes to its messages.

This Article was first published on The Seventh Eye. Read it in Hebrew here