Before the management at Forbes.com decided last July to insert paid advertisements into the very text of stories, there were no meetings with the entire editorial staff to discuss the change, and not everyone even knew that the ad scheme, called IntelliTXT, was going to begin.
"We were not forewarned," says one journalist, who asked to remain anonymous and claims to have learned of the ads from an Adweek article about Forbes.com’s new revenue stream. "Some of us were appalled."
IntelliTXT, an online advertising system developed by San Francisco-based Vibrant Media, which describes it as "contextual keyword advertising," scans Web content for words related to the services or products of paid advertisers and creates hyperlinks – which look similar to the editorial-driven hyperlinks found on almost every Web page. Mouse over one of these links, created out of relevant words in the text, and an ad pops up, allowing readers to click through to the advertiser’s site. It’s a small but radical new step in the blurring of the line between advertising and editorial – the journalistic equivalent of the product placement that is so prevalent in movies and on television.
Jim Spanfeller, president and CEO of Forbes.com, concedes that there was no companywide memo announcing the use of IntelliTXT, but denies that it came as a surprise to the staff. "I’m sure that there were official or unofficial discussions at least with everybody," he says, explaining that by "everybody" he means those employees who would normally be involved in advertising initiatives. "This was conceived of as an experiment from the beginning. We were pretty clear about that with all concerned."
Online advertising challenges traditional assumptions about what are acceptible practices and what are not for the simple reason that you can do things on the Internet that you can’t do in other media. Interstitials, roaming flash animation, banners, and skyscrapers are all attempts to squeeze profitability out of eye space, and the debate over what’s appropriate has been simmering since the early days of the Web. But the encroachment of ads into the text, as opposed to over, under, above, below or beside it, is new. Such Web publishers as TheAutoChannel.com and the video game site IGN.com use IntelliTXT, but Forbes.com was one of the first pure news sites to try the technology.
Spanfeller likens the ad technology to the "Buy This Book" ad links common to Web-based reviews and features. But IntelliTXT rubbed Forbes.com journalists wrong in ways that links to Amazon didn’t. It encroached on their work. They couldn’t choose what words were hyperlinked to ads, or what service or product was being pushed. Then there was the headline that ran on Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews site on August 3: FORBES.COM EXPERIMENTS WITH AD LINKS IN NEWS STORIES. The link led to a New York Times story discussing the ethical questions about IntelliTXT. The newsroom staff had seen enough, and let their bosses know it.
"When the concerns from the editorial staff were expressed I certainly shared some of those," says Forbes.com’s editor, Paul Maidment. "You get some inappropriate matches. An example would be, you have a story about Microsoft and Bill Gates and Gates’ would be hyperlinked."
Vibrant Media didn’t respond to a request for comment, but Doug Stevenson, the company’s CEO, told iMediaConnection.com in April, "The advertiser gets click-through rates of twenty-four times that of normal banners and skyscrapers." Since Forbes.com isn’t a public company, Spanfeller won’t discuss financial details, but he acknowledges that IntelliTXT made money for the Web site.
Nevertheless, when the higher-ups at Forbes.com decided to end the IntelliTXT experiment in December, they did so not at the insistence of readers, who Spanfeller says voiced almost no concern, but in deference to the opinions of members of the editorial staff. "There’s a lot about that line that is emotionally driven, and that’s what side we sort of came down on at the end of the day," he says. "We are, first and foremost, an editorial organization."
