ChasNote

According to a PR Week study (reported in AdAge), 48.9% of senior marketing execs have “editorial or broadcast brand placement” and “half of those who haven’t paid for placement said they would if the opportunity arose.” AdAge laments the sorry state of the media business when — perhaps as a result of such the above behavior — when “65% of consumers thought editorial mentions of a product had been paid for” (October 2005 Starcom MediaVest study).

Maybe traditional media should steal a page from the editorial policies at leading blogs (here’s FM’s policy). Hey, just about every for-profit media entity in the world takes advertising money. Maybe we should trust that our readers / viewers are grown ups, most of whom buy into the I-get-my-content-for-free-because-those-advertisers-pay-the-bills framework; let’s just tell them what’s going on. For example, here’s how Mike Arrington addresses his sponsors directly at TechCrunch. And here’s Philipp Lenssen, of Google Blogoscoped, disclosing that he’s writing about a sponsor.