“We die without editorial integrity” Stylist editor Lisa Smosarski on how free publications balance advertorial content
“We die without editorial integrity”, Lisa Smosarski, editor of Stylist magazine has said when asked whether free publications are becoming too sycophantic with advertisers.
Speaking at Advertising Week Europe about innovation within advertising, Smosarski vehemently disagreed that free publications like Stylist and Time Out struggle to maintain balanced content.
“Because we are free doesn’t mean we lack integrity,” she said. “In fact it is more important, and we have to prove that we are not beholden to our advertisers because our readers will not pick us up.
“I cannot tell you how responsive our readership is, they go out of their way to tell us exactly what they think about the magazine so we know that if we were sailing too far down the advertiser line that they would be really quite angry and move away from us quite quickly.”
Smorsarski added that she was “very adamant and very clear” what the boundaries are between editorial and advertorial content and "where we can and can't cross the line”.
Fellow panelist St. John Betteridge, managing director of advertising at Time Out, agreed and revealed that the publisher employs its commercial team as “guardians of the editorial”.
“[We] have practices in place where we realise where the line is. You do have to keep that commercial/editorial line and we have a situation going on at the moment where we have really had to push back on an issue.
“We are trying to produce content backed by an advertiser that would be in existence even if it wasn’t backed by an advertiser.”
Time Out’s international creative director Adam Harris said that the company is in a “start-up phase”, and tries to bring its audience something different with every commercial campaign.