“Family Fashions for Spring!” reads a bold headline in the April 2005 issue of Homemakers. The page’s layout is similar to countless others in consumer magazines: visuals with captions, columns, and service-oriented blurbs about the latest in fashion trends. But there’s a crucial difference – the story wasn’t put together by Homemakers, but Levi Strauss and Wal-Mart.

An advertorial is a text-heavy advertisement with a service journalism orientation – advertising a health-care-related product alongside advice on living a healthy lifestyle, for example. Although advertorials are intended to look like editorial layouts – copy, heads and decks, columns, visuals – they should be in a different typeface, with different design elements, and clearly marked as advertising.

Advertorials are usually supplied by advertisers, but now in-house creative teams of artists and writers at companies like Transcontinental Media and Rogers Publishing are working with company brand managers to refine advertising messages. “We prefer an advertorial to be designed to reflect the look of the book, so that the reader is more comfortable with it,” says T.J. Flynn, Transcontinental senior vice-president of advertising sales. “But it’s still recognized as a piece of advertorial and not editorial.”

Canadian magazine advertising revenues are reaching record high numbers, so it’s not surprising that the relationship between advertisers and publications has shifted. A Statistics Canada report shows that in 2003 advertising revenues soared to $610 million, representing eight years of solid growth. In 2004, this trend continued, says Gary Garland, president of Magazines Canada. In addition to larger revenues for magazine publishers, when advertorials are done properly, he says, “They can be a wonderful service and of interest to readers.”

At Chatelaine, advertorials must be distinguished from editorial content through “clear placement of advertiser logos, clearly different fonts and design, and/or a clear ‘advertisement’ slug,” says Kerry Mitchell, Chatelaine‘s publisher. “It is the publisher’s decision whether that criteria has been met.”

Advertisers recognize that successful magazines develop a relationship with readers and want to leverage it to their benefit. “It’s supposed to be a win-win situation,” says Bill Shields, Masthead‘s editor-in-chief. A magazine earns revenue and an advertiser attracts readers to its message.

But magazines, like journalists, are only as good as their integrity. When a company demands that its product be featured in a page that mimics the magazine’s design, it threatens a magazine’s integrity – a no-win situation. To appease editors who feel that advertising is encroaching on editorial space, the Canadian Society of Magazine Editors (CSME) created a set of guidelines in the late 1990s. According to CSME, “The integrity and long-term viability of magazines depends on a clear distinction between editorial and advertising, or both lose credibility. Eventually, so too will the magazine.” The organization took its cue from the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME).

Both ASME and CSME identified a number of specifics, including: publications should identify advertising that contains text or design elements similar to the editorial’s appearance; an ad’s layout, design, and typeface should not deliberately mimic the publication’s design; advertising pages shouldn’t be placed adjacent to editorial material in a manner that implies that the advertiser has influenced content; and editorial teams shouldn’t be required to prepare advertising sections. Unfortunately, CSME guidelines are too general to address recent issues, like what happens in the case of shopping magazines and custom publications that promote advertisers’ products in its editorial pages?

In September 2004,