Marketing as News Loses

The FCC is finally cracking down on the practice of televising commercials as news. PR Firms create slick promotional videos that look like news stories and send them to prospective clients and news organizations to get attention.

Portions of these VNRs (video news releases), such as interviews with executives or diagrams of how a product works are often edited into new pieces, but according to the FCC, 98 stations broadcast entire VNRs as if they were news. The Bush Administration got into trouble for distributing VNRs that took its position on issues such as healthcare and similarly masquerading them as news.

Today's bubbleheaded news broadcasts make it hard to differentiate anyway, but its good that the FCC is taking action. Instead of sneaking VNRs into the news hour, marketers should make their VNRs available for viewing online. VNRs that are made interactive through Flash and Web 2.0 technologies would be much more effective than text, and the bandwidth cost is minimal. It's a video world people, so why not take advantage of it?