Study: 'Stealth Advertising' Sliding Under Radar Into TV Newscasts

Advertisers’ messages are infiltrating small-market television newscasts at about the same percentage that owners of digital video recorders are skipping the commercials, say researchers at the University of Oregon.

What’s disturbing about this trend of “stealth advertising” is that viewers seldom are aware of potential slants in coverage because the connection of a story to an advertiser rarely is disclosed, says Jim Upshaw, a professor of journalism. Stealth advertising, he said, uses commercial messages that are intended to promote a product or service “that are cloaked in some other garment than a normal commercial.”

“Stations are not telling their viewers that what they are putting on the air in news or feature stories or in other news content is being done to court a specific advertiser,” Upshaw says. “I think people need to learn to be media literate, informed viewers of television. We may not be able to stop these practices but we need to be aware that these practices do exist.”

Upshaw and colleagues monitored two evening newscasts a month at 17 U.S. stations over four months in early 2004, including a February ratings sweeps week in which stations target larger audiences and thereby increase advertising revenues. The markets were affiliated with the four major commercial networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox).

They found that 90 percent of 294 monitored newscasts included at least one instance per newscast of stealth advertising. They documented 750 instances, about 2.5 individual slots per newscast – with an average of one minute, 42 seconds per occurrence – of commercial influences.

The study – co-authored by Upshaw and colleagues David Koranda, a visiting professor of advertising, and former journalism doctoral student Gennadiy Chernov, now at the University of Regina in Canada -- appeared in the June issue of the journal Electronic News.

Small market stations showed more commercially influenced material, either connected with or not connected with paid advertising, the researchers found. Small and medium markets also showed more explicitly commercially influenced promotional content.

“News is the big income generator for television stations,” Upshaw says. “Something like 40 percent of a station’s advertising sales revenue comes from ads running during newscasts or news-related presentations. Big markets do this too but often in other ways and different time slots.”

Upshaw spent 22 years as a television journalist. From 1982 to 1992 he was a reporter for the NBC-owned station in Washington, D.C. He retired from full-time teaching in June 2006. Upshaw and colleagues noted that commercial TV stations are indeed businesses.

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