Under the lifestyle section of China Daily Website, one of the most famous English-language news media in China, there is a post, Chinese Brands: Seal your look with lipsticks, reported that Chinese traditional culture nowadays has great impacts on domestic cosmetics products especially on lipsticks, from the package design to the ingredients used. At the end of the news, it mentioned a domestic cosmetic brand Florasis which makes Chinese culture and flower ingredients its most outstanding features, along with some compliments from a British makeup artist.
The content reflects a certain phenomenon that cosmetics with oriental characteristics is becoming popular and promote the brand Florasis at the same time. It is written by the editor from China Daily, thus the audience may not notice that it is branded content at the first glimpse of the post. The content is quite short and it appears in the content recommendation column Editors’ Picks. Even though the readers might find out that it is a native advertising in the end, it turned out that the post it is not repugnant by the readers since nearly all the comments are positive.
It seems more easier for the audience to accept the brand promotion in this integration without separation way which merging the branded content into this kind of trends report. Moreover, in this case it is more like promoting Chinses culture rather than endorsing a certain brand in Chinese English-language mainstream media who targets the readers all around the world. Likewise, the readers noticed the brand Florasis for sure while what attracted them more is the way to spread the Chinese culture with cosmetics industry.
However, the picture inserted are all sourced from T-mall which is one of the biggest E-commerce websites in China instead of from the brand official websites. To some extent, it might be an implicit guidance which the advertiser intentionally used to lead the readers to search the products or brand on the online shopping website and might further influence their purchase intention.
Nowadays consumer is facing abundant of advertising everywhere which can easily trigger their ad fatigue and avoidance. Besides, the ability to advertising identification for consumer these days keep rising which bring the challenge for the marketers to come up with advertising content and strategy more cautiously.
In fact, there are another post similar with these kind of fashion trends report whose headline starts with “Chinese brands” on China Daily website, but there is no specific introduction the certain brands like the Florasis one. It indicated China Daily as a news media publisher tries to blur the boundary between branded content and editorial. Also, based on advertising regulation of China Daily, branded content can only appear in lifestyle and travel sections. On one hand, it aims to remaining solid, serious and objective as a news media platform by separating editorial and advertising; on the other hand, the branded content can not only enrich the publisher content experience but also be a significant increase the revenue. Thus, its advertorials are controlled by its own editors who need to make a really good balance between the cultures and commercial of branded content.
As a news media, China Daily still needs to be cautious with the selection of topics as well as brands for its advertorials. At least from the post above, the effect is not bad for the media site since most of the comments are compliments.