by Doug Cumming, Washington & Lee University

You may have seen this beautiful online video. It’s called “Best coin ever spent.” On a perfect day last May, at 6 p.m., in the busy central square of an old European city, a man in whitetie formal attire stands frozen at his double bass, bow drawn. A little girl comes up, puts a coin into the upturned top hat on the pavement, and he begins bowing. Beautifully. A woman in heels and concert-stage black comes on the scene with a cello, sits in a small chair next to him, and joins in. You recognize that they are bowing the divine melody from Beethoven’s 9th symphony, the metaphysical “Ode to Joy.”

The charm slowly catches on in the busy plaza. A small crowd gathers as a bassoonist and other musicians arrive to play their parts. The magic engages children especially, as one of them climbs an old-fashioned lamppost to watch. Grownups record the scene on smart phones. The musicians filing out of a building now, including a conductor, are casually dressed, like the crowd, shirttails out. By the time the chorale assembles for the hair-raising German of Schiller’s poem, it’s hard to distinguish the musicians from the crowd. The joy of the listeners merges with the joy of the performance art, which merges with the joy of Beethoven – high culture and consumer culture melting together into a buoyant bliss, all for the lowlow price of that little coin.

When a friend in Atlanta put this video link on his Facebook page recently, I remembered it from months earlier. Back then, my brother in Nashville had emailed it, and this led to a few emails between us debating its value. (My brother and I fall into these email debates over value, truth, faith, and politics.) He had gotten the video from someone who had emailed it to about 100 friends with this message: “Hi, everyone; I normally don’t send videos out. If you want to get goose bumps and tears, watch this…” My brother had emailed the link to a few friends and relatives. The video is almost six minutes. My brother wrote:“ You may think you don’t have time…but a little dose of truth and beauty is what we all need.”

Truth and beauty? As a mass communications professor, I could see the beauty, or at least some “high production values.” But what truth does it tell? I thought of Clockwork Orange. There was a good reason that CBS News’ 1976 standards manual banned music “merely for aesthetic background purposes.” Music can manipulate emotions.

“Best coin ever spent” can be watched at http://www.wimp.com/bestcoin/.

What my brother saw was the Kingdom of God exploding in a city square, as in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. “You can see it in the people’s faces,” he wrote. I replied that I remained somewhat skeptical of all that emotion and slick editing. I suspected Eurozone p.r., and imagined a hint of German Aryan bruderbund from the 1930s. But I was a little ashamed of my skepticism, for as my brother wrote back, it is likely that God was working through Beethoven even if others twisted it to their own purposes.

Seeing the video again recently, I found a basis for my skepticism. Look carefully. The building behind the musicians is the Banco Sabadell of Spain. The bank’s name is on the building out of which the musicians come, and is given silent credit at the end. The video, it turns out, is “sponsored content,” or what ad agencies are calling “native” advertising.

Chris Graves, CEO of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, gave a provocative slide-show presentation earlier this year at Harvard’s Kennedy School and here at W&L on the profound shift of advertising now underway. Instead of buying advertising space from newspapers, magazine, TV programming and websites, corporations and marketing agencies are creating their own high-quality content – or at least something that looks like quality journalism or creative entertainment.

Advertorials are not new, and neither is product placement in movies. But new dynamics are giving sponsored content a big boost in the media today. One factor is the need of traditional media for life support as they lose traditional advertising. When you are about to die, as Graves put it gravely, do your ethics change? So, the venerable Atlantic Monthly published sponsored content from the Church of Scientology that almost looked like part of the Atlantic’s editorial content. Another factor is that people are less concerned with, or aware of, the traditional firewall that separated factual reporting and free expression from corporate interests. People want goose bumps, or tears, or what Kovach and Rosenstiel call “the journalism of affirmation.” They don’t care how directly corporate interests are involved, if it looks good and feels true.

The main factor is that people can send out amazing sponsored content to 100 friends by email or “like” it on Facebook. Then it goes viral, the jackpot of sponsored content. For example, the latest installment of Dove soap’s Real Beauty campaign – with a forensic sketch artist behind a curtain drawing women’s self-image against the same faces drawn from another person’s more positive description – went epidemic almost overnight. Besides half a million hits within 24 hours on social media sites like Facebook, Mashable and BuzzFeed, its YouTube versions approached 9 million views by mid- April, according to the New York Times. The Times quoted female fans who didn’t care that the powerful message was corporate marketing for a soap company. David Brooks, following up with a column that found the message interesting, admitted it didn’t pass muster as social science. Only one woman in the news story raised doubts, noting that the message – “You are more beautiful than you think” – still holds women captive to the idea that a beautiful face is the important thing.

Ask your journalism students what they think about sponsored content. I know at least one of our students was eager to hear from Ogilvy’s Graves how she might get a job in this growing business. And a good journalism student I know from Emerson College reported on her LinkedIn site that she was interning this summer in the Graduate Program at Red Bull. Yes, Red Bull has its own newsroom now, with more than 100 journalists producing videos, TV shows and a Red Bull magazine.

I’m beginning to realize that advertisers who paid for most of our journalism in the 20th century were not such bad characters after all. They were our protectors, underwriting a unique form of real independence that is hard to find today. I never met one, back when I was journalist. But I miss those guys.