Cracked Tears Down Editorial, Advertising Wall

Digiday reporting:
Most publishers wring their hands over how to run sponsored content that works for their audience and how to keep church and state apart.
Not such a problem for humor site Demand Media-owned Cracked, which skips the go-between of a “creative services team” and has brands work directly with its eight-person editorial staff. That’s helped it create sponsored content for brands like Virgin Mobile, Old Spice, AMC and TubroTax that bend toward Cracked’s warped sensibilities, like this AMC-sponsored article (for its show “Freak Show”) “6 Terrifying Mutations With Awesome Historical Explanations.” No, it’s not exactly investigative journalism going on at Cracked.
“When a brand hears that from the people actually doing it, it’s powerful in getting the brand to commit. It’s not just putting an article up about deodorant; it’s taking that team into finding the tangential relationship between messaging and what our audience cares about,” said Michael Dosset, who heads up Demand’s market strategy team.
This is a different approach than those adopted by other, more hard-news publishers which help brands create content. Publishers like The Atlantic, Huffington Post wall off creative services from editorial. Even BuzzFeed and Gawker have clear separation between editorial and advertising. Of course, Cracked isn’t like news publishers. Its editorial content is young dude-targeted, list-heavy pieces such as the 5 most unintentionally hilarious 80′s music videos or 4 things nobody admits about modern human sexuality.
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