Branding VICE (Updated)
The novel (and probably illegal) ways Vice feeds you bullshit.
(Updated March 11th 2017: I’ve added excerpts of an informative chat with a Vice insider to the part titled Branded News.)
Vice Media is a turkey, dressed as a peacock. Previous articles in this series established how their editorial department has no published code of ethics, their ‘content’ borders on fiction, the CEO repeatedly falsifies his biography (to sound cool) and the company’s circulation and demographics are smoke and mirrors to bait advertisers. So what — if anything — makes this turkey so delicious?
The shift from cool to corporate occurred in 2007 when Gavin McInnes, asshole-extraordinaire and co-founder of Vice, ‘abdicated the throne’ because editorial was being co-opted by Shane Smith — the marketing guy and current CEO.
Today, Vice is an amorphous blob occasionally dabbling in hard news. This ‘news’ frequently acts as a trojan horse for unmarked advertorials (aka: branded content / deceptive advertising / native content). A charge the CEO is intent on denying.
When Shane Smith told The Guardian he doesn’t do branded content he was, of course, too steeped in his own shit to make sense of reality. Vice has described itself as a company that does branded content in internal documents, legal filings and has won multiple awards for branded content. Alex Detrick, Vice Global Communications Director (who is difficult to reach* and only has 43 connections on LinkedIn), explained to a french publication Liberation that 90% of Vice’s revenues come from “what some call branded content”.
When Shane won AdWeek’s ‘Brand Genius award’, he told the audience that advertising celebrations “should be as big as the Emmys and the Academy awards,” and without the crowd erupting into chants of ‘hail Satan’ added “and we’re not going to stop till it happens”.
Thankfully, not everyone has been fooled. When Shane Smith took questions in an ‘Ask Me Anything’ he tried to convince people that Rupert Murdoch’s 5% buy-in gets him no influence “nothing”. One user replied saying that SEC rules require that investors be granted a ‘significant influence’ and ever since the ‘AMA’ two years ago: Shane has never returned to Reddit and James Murdoch remains on the board of Vice.
*After meeting with Gawker, NBC and the NYTimes, I sent Alex Detrick, Vice Global communications director (and former spokesperson for NY Attorney general), a short email asking if we could meet for 20 minutes. I never heard back but the e-mail made its way to Vice’s legal department who, a week later, mailed me some really fancy paper which read “To be clear, you are not to initiate any communication with VICE personnel anywhere during business hours or at any VICE place of business. These approaches cause VICE personnel to be concerned for their safety.” (Financial safety?)
Vice and Virtue
The tension between advertising and editorial is commonly referred to as church and state. At Vice church IS state. One of their lesser known media kits (p.19) overtly stated a social media post (Twitter, Facebook) could be purchased for $6,900 or an editorial could be purchased for $28,750 USD.
Andrew Creighton, President of Vice USA, might agree that church and state should remain separate but explained, at a New Media Moguls event, that “things have changed. We need brands to fund culture. We need brands to fund the things that we need,” explaining it’s easier depending on the type of content but “It’s gonna be harder in news.”
Brand influence — to the best of my understanding — is as follows:
- BRAND PARTNERSHIPS: Vice woos brands and PR agencies with their willingness to corrupt editorial.
- “MATCHMAKING”: Vice quietly greenlights content (news, documentary etc.) that mentions partnered brands. If articles are too critical (boycott or health related) they get rejected or altered. Often the contributors and associate editors don’t even know they are being pimped.
- PROFIT: Vice uses their magical accounting process to count brand impressions and report massive campaign successes.
Sure, the editorial process is ethically perverted but is it illegal? Yes, according to the Federal Trade Commission. The FTCs Guide for Businesses states that there needs to be clear and prominent disclosure in native advertising (aka: branded content).
“People browsing the Web, using social media, or watching videos have a right to know if they’re seeing editorial content or an ad.” — Jessica Rich, Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection.
Branded News
(Update March 11th: A Vice insider (who wishes to remain anonymous) has provided an informed counter-narrative to part of this segment. Their words are lightly formatted.)
Vice Insider:
[ON NUTELLA] “A lot of what you write is 100% correct. The Nutella thing [below] is not correct. You should take that down it de-legitimizes your site. The real problem with branded content is that it pre-censors ideas before they are even pitched. Also, the former [brand related role] was embezzling money from the company to fund a coke habit. Producers and writers [in some departments of Vice] are well aware of the brands they are doing advertising work for, so they would never pitch anything that would offend them. It’s not a matter of management having to censor what is published. The culture of fear does it already.”
[ON THREE TYPES OF BRAND WORK] “[1] There is white label content which is just straight up work for hire shit like what they are doing for the Olympic committee. Vice Doesn’t put their brand on it. [2] Then there’s branded content which runs on Vice’s verticals and the brief comes from the agency or client and Vice develops it and the agency will give notes etc. They can give notes in pre-production (ie: Casting, story subjects, style). [3] Then there is sponsored content which each vertical has a list of pre-developed ideas which then sales guys go out and sell and a brand can put their logo at the front of.
[ON “THE CRUX OF THE DANGER OF BRANDED AND SPONSORED CONTENT”] “…any digital content that cost 10k or more needed to be sponsored. [If producers] want to be making work they have to cater their pitches to what they think brands will like or not. The censorship isn’t Orwellian top-down, its more like Brave New World self imposed censorship.”
[ON “JUKING VIEWS”] “[Brands] pay in advance. [Vice] will usually promise a certain number of views. [Vice will] pay this service to juke their numbers on branded and sponsored pieces. You can tell because the number of views won’t be proportional to the number of likes and comments.”
[ON THE BAIT-AND-SWITCH OF WORKING AT VICE] “Producers at Vice take such a pay cut to work there because they want to make rad stuff so they very quickly absorb the rules of the game and self-regulate.
If, as Walt Mossberg famously stated, “Advertising is the mother’s milk of all the mass media” then Vice is the Authentic Mom™ Baby Formula of mass media … where the secret ingredient is saw dust.
Today, Vice’s content look more and more like ‘promoted posts’ found on social media. In the last three years, Vice has published 50 stories mentioning ‘Nutella’ — enough to fill three magazines. Often these stories have a jar featured in the main image or the word ‘Nutella’ in the title:
- How Nutella Explains the World
- How-To: Make Chocolate & Fruit Crepes with [a Porn Star]
- If I Could Join Nutella Addicts Anonymous, I Would
- Islamic State Fighters Love Nutella**
- France Says You Can’t Name Your Child “Nutella” or “Strawberry”
- I Ate Nothing but Nutella for a Week and Found My Inner Darkness
- This Guy Invented a Special Lock to Stop People Stealing His Nutella
- This Guy Attacked a 78-Year-Old Man in a Costco Over a Sample of Nutella
- Soccer Star’s Crippling Love of Nutella May Have Gotten Him Fired
My guess is that Nutella pays Vice on a per-view or per article basis with kickbacks exceeding ten thousand dollars a pop. Three reasons (mostly repeating myself)… First, in 2009 when Advertising Age spoke with Vice’s General Manager Hosi Simon he said Vice wants to “make amazing brand communications that affect people”. Other publishers, like the CBC, avoid brands as much as possible. Second, Vice put in their Spanish language media kit they would pimp editorial for 28k. Third, editorial has made concessions for brand partners like Heineken, Brisk, Nike, UFC, AT&T, Bank of America, N.F.L. and Rogers.
How do they compare to other media outlets? One ‘critical’ article “France Is Concerned that Nutella Is Destroying the World” begins as criticism but morphs into PR. The article, in defense, cites its own anti-boycott article along with Fererro’s Palm Oil Charter. And ends with “if you were to try, that would be a whole lot of hands to try to rip jars of Nutella out of.” When the NY Times wrote critically of Nutella’s “cultlike following” and misleading commercials (NYTimes 2009) people took action. Nutella lost a million dollar class-action lawsuit (and appeals) for deceptive ads with false nutritional claims.
Just compare coverage of Budweiser’s latest media stunt: The NYTimes used the title Budweiser’s New Campaign Taps Into Political Climate while Vice titled it Budweiser Has Finally Become the Most American Thing Ever. The result is something indistinguishable from a press release.
This somewhat subtle matchmaking process has many benefits: contributors and junior staff don’t know the duplicitous use of their writing but — more importantly — this ‘news’ avoids filtering from aggregators like Google News and Apple News which both forbid advertorials.
To quote Google News: (emphasis theirs) “Stick to the news — we mean it! Google News is not a marketing service. We don’t want to send users to sites created primarily for promoting a product or organization, or to sites that engage in commerce journalism.” (Google 2016)
Here are some of Vice’s brand partners (and number of mentions) that made it into Google News feed:
- AT&T (217), AXE body spray (89), Bank of America (145), Bud Light (51), Budweiser (110), Chanel (250), Corona (123), Dell Computer (31), Disney (649), Heineken (64), Hellman’s (8), Intel (272), Red Bull (588), Stella Artois (10), Pixar (69), Planet of the Apes (24), Marmite (22), Dove soap (Unilever) (6), Vaseline (59).
On average, Vice mentioned these brands at two to three times the frequency of other American media (compared to NYTimes, WSJ, CNN, PBS, VOX, BUZZFEED) and over eight times that of BBC. Without a complete list, (anyone?) I can only estimate that 10% of all articles on Vice mention brand partners — just at the threshold of perception.
** The media circus surrounding ISIS and Nutella is perplexing. By 2015, DAESH was making 90,000 social media posts a day. In June 2014 a french ISIS fighter tweeted a photo standing with a jar of Nutella. In August 2014 The Daily Mail found a second image and tweeted “ISIS jihadists love Nutella, just like everyone else” and the twittersphere erupted. Not to be outdone, CNN said “ISIS lures women with kittens, nutella”. By December 2014 Vice went full tilt with a twitter collage of the death cult enjoying Nutella. The main image came from a short-lived account that conveniently tagged the image “#nutella #jihad”. The photo (which was later removed) was taken in the hipster-flash / Terry Richardson style. Is this another example of Vice making the news instead of just reporting it?
The Cancer Dollar
Vice’s self-depreciating embrace of being labeled the “all-embracing, all-swallowing whore of Babylon” isn’t so funny anymore. The company now plays both sides of the cancer game.
- In 2007 Vice produced a series of anti-smoking ads for truth.org
- In 2014 Vice on HBO season one had a segment on the unregulated tobacco industry in Indonesia. One highlight included a scene where host Thomas Morton, asks the father of a 9 y/o boy “Who do you think is to blame for [your son’s addiction]?,” and replies “A small part is the cigarette ads,” which were banned in america in 1971.
- In 2015 Vice produced a special report called ‘Killing Cancer’ wherein Shane Smith recalls a personal story of his mother’s fight with metastatic breast cancer, and watching his stepmother die from it. The show reportedly raised two million dollars to fight cancer.
- In 2016 Philip Morris signed a deal with the Vice subsidiary Edition Worldwide (a bullshit company you were never meant to hear about comprised of Vice Media CEO Europe, Middle East & Africa and Vice Media President International) to produce “white label content” (anonymously produced, high profit work).
An employee involved in one of the above productions said the move to produce content for Philip Morris was “richly hypocritical,” and “just reflects a long history of a company that has always been driven by the sales and marketing, not editorial.” When asked about the effects on staff they said that “a lot of talented new folks slowly maligned by the toxic leadership on top.” A leader who: doesn’t care about journalism, thinks journalists are stupid and, as numerous employees have described to me, doesn’t care at all about content.
Does Vice occasionally make quality content? Yes, but the best work serves to add credibility to the bad content and the bad content takes away credibility from the good content. Only a standard code of ethics (mentioned in part 1) will change things.
Vice’s business model isn’t benign. Journalism is in decline. America now has nearly 5 PR people for every reporter, double the rate from a decade ago. Vice’s novel brand agenda is a death knell of journalism.
UPDATE 2: Around Sep 2016, three months after this article was published, Vice began putting brands in once place: “partners.vice.com” with clear and prominent disclosure. Two years later (Sep 2017) Vice stopped. Read more.
I’d like to thank the twenty current and former Vice employees who have answered my questions and helped me write this series. All my articles are open to updates, clarifications and corrections. Comment, email or DM me on Twitter.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DANIEL VOSHART has shot over 100 films including an hour of music video, five hours of documentary and six hours of fiction. He spends most his time designing and some of his time raking muck.
ABOUT NOT VICE
not vice is a Medium publication. The fruit of the labour of a crowdfunded book — The Unofficial Guide to Vice Media. Everything in the book will be released on this site.
ALSO BY AUTHOR
VICE SERIES
Part 1: Everyone is Laughing at VICE
Part 2: Fact Checking Vice: A Fiction
Part 3: Shane Smith: ‘Billionaire’ and ‘Regular Guy’
END of Part 4: Branding Vice
NEXT — Part 5: Vice’s Legacy (Will Vice collapse under its own dishonesty? Will advertisers notice their web traffic, magazine circulation and demographics are illusionary? Will Shane finally dupe a bank into backing IPO?)
OTHER VICE POSTS
I’m Writing a Book on Vice Media and Police Came to My Door
Vice Media Kit — WARNING for Advertisers
Vice Media: Two Terminations — A ‘documentary’ on abortion gone awry
