Here, I can make an example on a recent advertorial campaign which is launched by a dairy product company.
I would not like to enclose that company’s name, but I’m sure you do aware that there are a lot of blogs are posting the exact same thing recently, which you can see very obvious the writing styles are not those blogger’s usual writing styles.
This dairy company demanded the bloggers to attend a briefing which is not necessary at all. In the briefing, they just gave the bloggers some information about the product they want the bloggers to write. And the whole briefing is just about what inside those information they gave, which are all common knowledge and something very simple.
For something as simple as this, I don’t think it is necessary for all these bloggers to attend the briefing at all. They can just send these information to these bloggers and let these bloggers read it.
To be honest, I had received some more difficult task which the contents are far more complicated. But the whole campaign correspondence was only done through email, and there is only one document for me to read and understand the product and its details. But of course, advertisers who are competent like this, will never be a Malaysian company. That is an oversea company which required me to write an IT gadget, where the article contents shall be including its functionalities and its hardware architectures.
The dairy product company not only require the bloggers to attend the worthless briefing. They also required all bloggers who write exactly what them self want and insisted that all bloggers to write in the exact same writing style. This had caused these blogger’s readers to realized all these articles are paid articles and losing confidence to the integrity of these bloggers.
By paying to these bloggers just a piece of peanuts, and want these bloggers to give up the ethics and losing integrity, I would say this is not a worth deal at all. And fuck this dairy product company for paying these bloggers for such a low pay advertorial fees and causing these bloggers to sacrifice so many thing! Professional bloggers are usually paid more than US$50++ for honest reviews regardless the reviews are negative or positive, as long as they were written based on facts!