Advertorial cost and craft

An advertorial is paid space dressed as editorial: your story, the magazine's typography, a label that admits the arrangement. Pricing is quote-only across our ledger and anchors to the display card: expect the space to bill like the equivalent display unit, plus production if the publisher's studio writes and lays it out. The card price is the floor of the conversation, not the total.

The label is not optional

FTC native advertising guidance is blunt: readers must be able to tell paid content from editorial before they engage with it, with clear proximate labels in plain language such as "Advertisement" or "Paid Advertisement", not coy terms buried in small type.^[1] Publishers enforce their own versions because their credibility is the asset being rented. A seller casual about labeling is casual about the thing that makes their pages worth buying. Walk.

Who writes it matters

Publisher-studio advertorials read native because the people who set the book's voice wrote them; you trade control and pay production. Agency- or self-written pieces protect your message and your legal review, then risk reading like a press release in borrowed clothes. Either way, contract the approval chain in writing: who signs the final proof, and whether "as told to" quotes need your compliance pass. The insertion order, Step 07, is where that clause lives.

When it outperforms display, and when it backfires

Advertorials earn their premium when the product needs explaining: a new category, a considered purchase, a story a headline cannot carry. They backfire when the label and the content disagree; readers punish content that tries to hide its nature, and so does the FTC.^[1] If your offer fits in a headline and a coupon, buy the half page and keep the difference.

Writing and layout craft: Step 08. Annotated examples: the tear sheets. Straight display economics: the cost guide.