Another excellent response to what could’ve been a delicate question. Presenting Dr Bhaskar Das in the February 24 edition of Das ka Dum. Read on…

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Q. When you see an article tagged ‘Marketing Initiative’ or ‘Promotional Feature’ or some such, do you trust its content?

A. It all depends on how a topic is treated. If it smacks of just a propaganda or public relations exercise, I don’t engage with it. We can’t take our addressable audience as unintelligent and gullible. Hence, trust and credibility must be at the core of such content creation. If one treats such content as ‘Native Content’ as in digital space, not always though, the engagement becomes better. Promotional content per se needn’t have a pejorative perception. The creator of such contents is responsible to give it a negative tag. In the age of active Earned Media, one needs to treat promotional content with as seriousness as other edit content, if one wants engagement/ immersion in the content.