It means an advertisement that pretends to be an actual news article, like the ones it accompanies on the internet, or in a magazine. The advertorial’s format and contents are dressed up to look like a real news story.
Apparently, it is intended to trick people into believing that they are reading an actual news story, rather than just an ad. Instead of using the word “Ad” or “Advertisement” at the top of the piece, they use “Advertorial” in a small, lighter font, where it might not be noticed, or understood, if it is.
The clever advertising trick: people will read some or all of the advertorial, rather than dismiss it, as "Just another gimmicky ad” without reading ANY of it. (You can't hook someone if they don't read it.) It may even fool some people into buying the product.
Advertorials have been around for a long time, but I didn't know there was a name for it.
Caveat emptor.
So if you're telling people print and TV news is bogus, why are you using ads that look like newspaper articles or TV news reports to sell what you're hawking?
At the magazine where I oversaw advertorial, we were fairly obsessive about following those guidelines. Every page had to be clearly marked with the name of the advertiser. The fonts, grid and design had to be different from editorial. Our goal was to have print pages that looked better than some editorial pages, and since we had more money than the edit team, we could do that. A casual reader might not notice that our pages were different but if you put edit and advertorial side by side, you couldn’t miss it.
A lot of magazines and web sites like to fudge the guidelines. That’s what gives advertorial a bad name. It’s not journalism, by definition, since the advertisers control the content. But that doesn’t mean it’s false. Our approach was that since it was appearing in a news mag, everything had to pass a fact check. The advertiser could spin but not lie. Advertisers, of course, really wanted “pay for play” stories where they got the credibility of editorial coverage but they controlled the story. Lots of trade mags and low-budget outlets make such deals. We didn’t.
Oddly, where I worked, it was the editorial team that liked to push the boundaries, for their own reasons. In my view they were begging for a scandal.
There’s some really good advertorial out there. Hyundai’s “Rolling with the Rookies “ videos, about NFL draftees, are advertorial. You can watch them and not realize at first that they’re car ads.
Advertisers always want to cross the line. As long as the lines aren’t crossed, advertorial is ok. Unfortunately the lines get blurred or crossed too often.