New Research: The Advertorials Many Media Outlets Make for Oil Companies Are Misleading, But They Don't Have to Be

Drilled

Critical Frequency

True Crime, Earth Sciences, Social Sciences, Science

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2025

⏱️ 19 minutes

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Summary

We have covered before how the fossil fuel industry created the advertorial and how it continues work with media on the modern incarnation: sponsored content, created by the media outlets themselves. To be clear, it’s outlets’ internal brand studios that write op-eds, craft slide shows and videos, and produce podcasts for fossil fuel companies, not their editorial staff. But these services are explicitly marketed as a way to make corporate content mirror the editorial content in style and approach, and when it comes to fossil fuel advertisers it often directly contradicts what the editorial staff is reporting. In late 2023, we published a report detailing the many examples of this and delving into the peer-reviewed research that shows how misleading this practice is to readers. This week, one of the researchers who has contributed the most to that body of evidence, Dr. Michelle Amazeen, at Boston University, published a new study looking at why this practice is particularly misleading on social media, and what media outlets might be able to do to make it less so. She joins us to speak about that research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. I know we've been away for a little bit. That's for two
0:08.7	reasons. First, I've been working on a book. That's done at least the first draft now. And second,
0:14.8	we've been working on a few different seasons for this year. So we've got a lot of stuff coming your way. Today, an update on
0:23.6	something that we've covered a few times in the past. Advertorials. I'm joined by Dr. Michelle
0:29.9	Amazine from Boston University. Dr. Amazine has done some of the best research on how people actually take in information from advertorials,
0:41.0	whether they're able to differentiate between advertorial and editorial content, all that
0:46.8	kind of thing. She's just completed a new study looking at how different interventions
0:53.5	might work to help readers navigate an information ecosystem
0:59.2	that includes lots of abattoirials.
1:02.4	She particularly looked at how labeling on social media could help people figure out what's what. And also whether surrounding these ads could help
1:15.7	people be inoculated to some of the misleading information that's often included in them.
1:22.6	It's a really interesting study and we had a super interesting conversation too. Hope you enjoy it.
1:47.1	I'd love to know just a little bit of the background on what prompted you guys to undertake this study.
1:50.8	What made you think, okay, we need to look at what might be done about this stuff?
2:00.0	Yeah, so I have been studying persuasion and misinformation for probably a decade now.
2:06.1	And I started looking into native advertisements, just broadly, not specific to the fossil fuel industry. I published a number of studies about
2:12.7	the use of native advertising, how difficult it is for the public to be able to identify native advertising
2:20.2	and distinguish it from news reporting, news articles. And I think at one point I had a study where
2:28.1	I contrasted two native advertisements. One was from, I think it was Cole Hahn.
2:37.3	So it was a fashion designer.
2:39.3	That ad was kind of imitating, mimicking soft news.
2:44.1	The alternative native advertisement was from Chevron,
	...

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