Paul Kapustka brings up a very interesting story about what on the surface looks like editorial censorship by the Wall Street Journal. He referenced the concept of what the government sometimes does when redacting text in official documents. Paul’s eagle eye gets a gold star for spotting that one.
So in looking at it from a former ad selling and buying guy’s perspective, my hunch is that the WSJ has some rather strict guidelines on the concept of advotorials vs. display advertising.
The reasons for guidelines on advotorials are quite simple. People read them and think they are editorial copy. As such a line of text like he described that was written not as a quote, but as a writer’s statement would make it look like the WSJ wrote that. It was a claim, possibly false, and for those reasons the WSJ said pull the text. Since it was too late to likely recompose the ad, the only solution, and actually better for Vonage, was to have the WSJ composing room redact the text.
In my mind the WSJ could have just said, no to the ad. But given the $$$ involved this was a better solution for both parties. Somehow I would think this was well planned and give credit to the folks who artfully came up with the idea…