In the wake of two largely unforeseen shocks to the transatlantic system – Brexit and the electoral victory of Donald Trump and the Republican Party – the idea that we are entering a ‘post-truth’ phase of socio-political reality has gained significant currency. Along this line of thinking, the boundaries between facts and opinions (and now ‘alternative facts’), truth and ‘fakery’, and logic and emotions are now dangerously blurred – and much of this supposed blurring stems from our evolving relationships with information sources.

In both the Brexit and Trump scenarios, the sheer volume of half-truths, exaggerations, simplifications and outright falsehoods that bombarded the public information sphere has at most turned the tide of electoral consensus towards these populist choices; or, at the least, contributed to an environment where all information – even that provided by ‘experts’ in their chosen field – is to be viewed with suspicion or disdain. In a post-truth world, emotional intuition ‘trumps’ empirical facts, and information sources are viewed as corrupted or as near-universally biased and unreliable in some form or another. In such a toxic information environment, there is no consensus on objectivity; everything is propaganda - even empirical facts - to someone.

Mara Einstein’s Black Ops advertising provides a lively and highly informative analysis that speaks to one aspect of this phenomenon by outlining the processes and implications contributing to the ‘muddying of advertising and editorial’ online content.

The premise and argument of her book is simple enough: the blurring of profit-driven messaging with ostensibly benign news information has profound ethical implications for the public interest that are not being sufficiently considered or acted upon. In the relentless pursuit of revenue, content is increasingly suffused with (and often even entirely consisting of) marketing campaigns. Readers or ‘consumers’ now struggle to distinguish advertising from editorial content, creating a world of mis- and disinformation driven by popularity and measured through the currency of clicks, ‘Likes’, and ‘eyeballs on screens’. This in turn further propels the creation of new content designed to measure consumer data and to engage consumers with brand identities. For Einstein, not only does this impact on all of us by manipulating our behaviour and monetising our social interactions, it stultifies our collective progress by ensnaring all of us – creators and consumers – into a web of unending corporate ‘engagement’.

The purpose of this book is to help the reader navigate through such a world. In this respect, Black ops advertising is in most senses successful. The analysis is at its strongest where the author discusses abuses and subterfuge in publisher/advertiser relationships, and their relationships with consumers. The book’s structure is particularly useful in that it devotes equal space to the manner in which advertisers act as publishers, and vice versa. The former case includes a number of rather shocking vignettes, particularly the role of Tremor, a firm specialising in gaining traction for brands by recruiting ‘influencers’, in turning children into corporate shills to their friends and families in return for coupons and discounts. The latter case is most aptly displayed through Einstein’s discussion of ‘native advertising’ – that is, advertising incorporated into websites to appear, as much as possible, as though they were legitimate, editorial ‘news stories’. Einstein highlights the role of CNN, for instance, in its creation of an in-house native advertising company with a specific remit of creating advertising that ‘looks like news’. Einstein argues, through the parsing of one CNN executive’s business-speak, that the network leveraged its self-perception as an ‘unbiased news source’ as a means of successfully obfuscating advertising from editorial. Of course, such activities are not unique to CNN; as Einstein points out, only ten percent of publishers are not currently engaged in native advertising. In a media environment where traditional media outlets seek to promote themselves as purveyors of ‘real news’ as opposed to the conspiratorial ‘InfoWars’ or the alt-right ‘Breitbart’, such revelations are hardly helpful to their self-image.

A criticism of this work is that it could, with a slightly larger scope of inquiry, be something of greater significance. Throughout this book, Einstein hints at – but never conclusively builds into her argument – the broader issues presented to the thesis of the post-truth world by neoliberal economics. This is possibly a consequence of the style of the book, which is conversational and informal, mitigating a more structured academic approach to theoretical analysis. Indeed, ‘Black ops advertising’ as a concept is rightly recognised as a symptom of an online economy dominated by an insatiable need for advertising revenue and shaped by the monopolistic practices of technology giants. Einstein draws the conclusion that financial implosion of the advertising-based online media economy is highly likely  because these firms have - like the banking sector seven years ago - become ‘too big to fail’ and lack sufficient regulation. It is neither uncontroversial to posit such a boom-and-bust scenario nor to state that the information revolution has allowed new opportunities for media organisations to reach consumers, and new ways for advertising to exert its influence within the fourth estate. 

However, the notion that this model could (and evidently already does) disrupt not only the financial model of information and news delivery systems, but also the very concept of impartiality and objectivity upon which news organisations built their reputations, would lead one to suspect that it is not simply the trend of ‘black ops advertising’, or even the technological mediums through which it has emerged that is the real issue, but rather the manner in which pecuniary interest compromises all claims to journalistic and editorial integrity. The juxtaposition of ‘news’ from ‘advertising’ that runs as a foundational binary throughout this work is convenient for argument’s sake, as it allows Einstein to distinguish between them and argue for their increasing inseparability, but feels distinctly ahistorical in approach. Because there is scant discussion about what supposedly legitimate news looks like, there is little in the way of a theoretical frame of reference from which to analyse how information sources have changed. 

Instead, we are given an almost nostalgic view of a pre-social media ‘good old days’, where the idea of ‘news’ is taken uncritically outside the prism of the intermingling of content in the current era. Of course, ‘black ops advertising’ is simply a facet of propaganda, hence the preoccupation of its exponents with the centrality of emotional connection and social interaction, or rather the exploitation thereof, to promote products and ‘engage’ with consumers. If one views the merger of advertising and editorial content as a form of economic propaganda, they might argue, as Chomsky and Herman did in Manufacturing consent (1988), that ‘black ops’ advertising is simply a technological innovation on an age old conceit; that is, to use the presumed legitimacy of ‘news’ as a means of promoting and normalising elite agendas. Under this rubric, ‘black ops advertising’ transforms from a ground-breaking phenomenon into simply a technological innovation, and in the process undercuts much of the argumentation on which the book’s thesis rests. Despite this criticism, Black ops advertising is an important work in its own right, and given the atmosphere of deliberate obfuscation which we all have been forced to inhabit, shines a narrow light into a chasm of corporate deception.

Mara Einstein. 2016. Black ops advertising : native ads, content marketing, and the covert world of the digital sell. O/R Books. 250 pages. ISBN 978-1-682190-42-5. Paperback.