"here's a tool for vetting news and information in the digital age. The "SMELL" test won't make you foolproof, but it can help you become a savvy information detective. Apply it to any content purporting to be factual from any source - face-to-face, to Facebook, to Fox, the New York Times, and online "to infinity and beyond." On some major issues, fact-checking websites will sniff out bias for you, e.g., Factcheck, Politifact, and Snopes. But most of the time, you're on your own."

"Welcome to the brave new world of native advertising, where publishers are trying to come up with twists that go beyond standard ads and that carry the whiff of editorial credibility. For an advertiser like Samsung, the (mostly) positive CNET review is probably worth more than a display ad bought on the site. CNET Replay has enabled Samsung, Intel, Microsoft and Lenovo to promote positive reviews for their products long after they were published."

"The marketing blitz has only intensified since then. A Ben & Jerry's ice cream tie-in. An Anchorman exhibit at Washington, D.C.'s Newseum. Seventy car commercials starring Ron Burgundy. (Chrysler reported record sales after they went viral on YouTube.) An event at Emerson College in Boston naming their communications department after him, if only for a day. A Ron Burgundy "autobiography" - excerpted in The New Yorker. Appearances on ESPN, MTV, even a Canadian curling competition. The scorched-earth media strategy is designed to work in a world of millions of screens, says Ben Carlson of the social-media tracking company Fizziology."

"On Thursday night, as millions tuned in to see Carrie Underwood ambitiously take on the role of Maria von Trapp, croon about the hills being alive, and make children's clothing out of drapes in NBC's The Sound of Music Live, DiGiorno Pizza was also watching-and live-tweeted the whole thing. The Nestlé brand's tweets were funny and hilariously pizza-related"

"Pop Secret and Deutsch Los Angeles have for the last year been coming up with innovative digital ways to change your popcorn-eating experience, via Pop Secret Labs. There was Pop Search, a browser add-on that searched the web to find the best place to watch a movie online; a Rotten Tomatoes partnership to help viewers find like-minded critics; and an app to prevent your popcorn from ever burning again. But this might top them all. Pop Dongle is a mobile phone attachment that emits the sweet-and-salty smell of popcorn as you play the brand's mobile game, Poptopia, available for iPhone and iPod Touch."

"In recent years, the web has exploded with images, blogs and microsites that glorify dangerous weight loss at any cost. Photos of emaciated girls tagged with #thinspiration and #thinspo saturate Twitter feeds and Tumblrs. Waist-down shots picture girls in gym gear that hangs off their shrinking bodies. Pinterest photos depict women with #thighgap; they're so thin that, even with feet together, their thighs don't touch, a genetic impossibility in most, but one that can occur in the dangerously thin. In a sense, the phenomenon is nothing new. Similar photos have been online since the late '90s. But their volume and accessibility is unprecedented. One survey shows that between 2006 and 2008 alone, the number of such sites had increased by 470%. At the same time, dieters are getting younger. According to NEDA, 40-60% of girls aged 6-12 are concerned about their weight or about becoming too fat."

"Native ads are ads that don't look like ads. They blend in with the main content of the site, like a promoted Tweet from Samsung about its new phone, or an article about a miracle weight loss drug on a news site. >This week, on December 4, the Federal Trade Commission is hosting a kind of town-hall meeting about native advertising -- which is starting to look like the goose that lays golden eggs to online advertisers and websites. Advertisers love them because they work, users interact with them more than they ever did with banner ads; sites love them, because they pay; site owners can charge more for these ads than they ever did for banners."

"Based on an article in Marketplace Tech published Dec. 3, it might not be that easy on digital media. The advertising in question, referred to as "native ads" by author Stacey Vanek Smith, are ads that do not look like ads. Because of this, Smith reports the Federal trade Commission will look into their use. The reason: fear people cannot tell the difference and might be misled, misinformed or just plain, as one source said, "hoodwinked.""

"The fact is, there is a very good chance that, last night, Amazon "announced" a service that will never exist in reality. Why did Amazon do that? The answer is free advertising. Even better: free advertising the night before the biggest e-commerce shopping day of the year, Cyber Monday. How much was that free advertising worth? "60 Minutes" gave more than 15 minutes to its Amazon story. A 30-second spot during the 7 p.m. show usually costs just over $100,000. If you figure Amazon got 30 30-second commercials' worth of time, you can estimate that it got about $3 million worth of "earned" media. "

"But it wasn't a fluke. That's the problem. In just the past two weeks, the Internet has been told, by sources they trust (and share on Facebook), that a New Jersey waitress was stiffed on tips by an anti-gay family and that Amazon.com was about to launch product-delivering drones. This was just two months after Jimmy Kimmel created a sort of viral ad for his TV show, a video of a "twerk fail" that was reported by multiple TV news channels as real. Or real enough. Hey, it was a video on the Internet! In all three of these cases, readers were pointed to fake stories that were basically PR for successful businesses or-in the New Jersey case-a scam by a waitress whose collegues considered her an inveterate liar. How many news outlets tried to confirm these stories before running them? You don't want to know."

"When you see photo "proof," ask yourself: what is that a photograph of? Could I reproduce that evidence myself in under 45 seconds using my cell phone camera, a pen, and a coaster? Is that a shot of something on a computer screen, which means almost nothing? Does that look like a piece of "evidence" that would get by a savvy tenth-grade geometry teacher trying to figure out why a kid was late to class? Does the behavior being described sound like the behavior of a human? Are people in the story reacting the way you would expect people in that story to react? Does it appear that everyone in the story has been scripted by a reality television producer?"

"It's been about a month since Instagram users have been subjected to ads in their feeds, and the photogenic world somehow hasn't ended. In fact, the companies behind the ads seem to be reaping some benefit, even if the actual value proposition here is still a bit foggy. Curalate, an outfit working with companies that want to advertise on social media, looked at all five brands included in Instagram's first push. If nothing else, the paid ads were much more effective at attracting likes than the unsponsored posts by the same brands, as the chart below shows:"

"A new ad campaign warning of the dangers of anorexia produced these evocative photos of what a real woman would look like if the sketches were representative of real life. The models themselves are Photoshopped but nonetheless are a reminder of the dangers posed by unrealistic expectations of beauty promoted throughout our culture"

"Ponder this fact for a moment: the human brain hasn't changed for more than 100,000 years. Yet its exposure to information - especially screen-based communication - is growing at an unprecedented rate. Researchers at Nielsen NeuroFocus have been using brainwave measurements to actually quantify how all this multi-platform messaging is affecting subconscious responses. One of their observations is the effect on "filtering." Through filtering, the prefrontal cortex of the brain continuously coordinates and prioritizes incoming stimuli, deciding what is essential and what can be ignored or "filed away" for later. More stimuli requires more filtering. Our multi-device world has caused the brain to kick into overdrive, making prioritization more important than ever. Our multi-device world has caused the brain to kick into overdrive, making prioritization more important than ever. How on earth can marketers get through this "filtering" when the brain is screening megabytes of data every milliseconds? These neurological best practices may help you grab the attention of your online audiences' collective subconscious quickly."

"You may encounter media today from any number of sources, from traditional news sources to social media to email. How do you know what to trust? Ask these six questions and they will unlock whether something is trustworthy. It's easier than you think. They will make you a more critical thinker and save you from being misled. (These come the book "Blur: How to Know What to Believe in the Age of Information Overload" by myself and Bill Kovach)."

"The marketing research company One Poll looked into female body confidence for the online clothing line New Look by surveying 2,000 women ages 18 to 65 in the UK. 15% of 18 to 24 year olds said they thought that models in magazines actually looked like their photos when walking around every day, which is to say nothing of the people who subconsciously think that and don't even realize it. Other stats:"

"In fact, it's a common occurrence. In a recent example, Advertising Benchmark Index, a researcher that grades ad on 14 key performance indicators including awareness, message and call-to-action, found that although Kmart's "Ship My Pants" ad was a viral hit, relatively few consumers knew it was a Kmart ad. Gary Getto, ABX's president, says that similarly, when consumers see a white cat in an ad, they assume it's for Fancy Feast, the cat food brand, which uses a white cat as a mascot."

"Once a mark of rebellion, tattoos are fast becoming one of corporate America's favorite branding tools. This spring, Red Bull and the British e-tailer ASOS also set up pop-up tattoo parlors (at Miami Music Week and SXSW, respectively), and Sailor Jerry rum hosted a SXSW party where attendees were offered free tattoos of anchors and other brand-related designs. Last year, HBO gave away Game of Thrones tats, and this August free tattoos will be offered at a VIP Lollapalooza event hosted by Chicago's Hard Rock Hotel. For today's marketers, tattoos are just another gimmick-a sort of permanent promotional T-shirt. "Who needs a food truck at your party when you can do a tattoo truck?" says Bruce Starr, a partner at BMF Media, the agency behind the Hard Rock and ASOS events."

"We, as human beings, think that through social networks, we've somehow become more social creatures. The problem with this theory is, the more we "connect" online, the less actual human interactions we have, making us actually fairly unsocial. A new video breaks down exactly how the social aspects of human beings have evolved and transformed, showing how we've regressed from a social standpoint."

Blog for a course at Ringling College of Art & Design. Has links to student blogs as well.