Notes for owners · Branding and communication
How to write an advertorial
Paid space that reads like the paper wrote it. That is the whole value and the whole risk, and the label at the top is not negotiable.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 8 min read
An advertorial is advertising space written and set to look like the publication's own pages. You buy the space, you supply or approve the words, and the page carries a label saying it is a promotional feature. That label is a requirement, not a courtesy: advertising that could be mistaken for editorial has to be distinguishable from it, and a paper that lets you hide it is a paper you should not be in. Everything else about writing one follows from those two facts.
Write in the paper's voice, not yours
Brand copy says "we". Editorial says "the company". Brand copy says the best in the city. Editorial says a figure and where it came from.
So the first draft goes into the third person, in the past tense, with a news reason at the top. A new unit opened. A machine was installed. A clinic started a procedure that was not available in that district. An anniversary was marked. Without that reason the page reads as an advertisement in a costume, and readers see through it before the end of the first paragraph.
Then match the desk's style. Most papers will not print exclamation marks, superlatives without attribution, or a list of branches inside the body. They have their own rules on how a company name is written and how a person is titled. Ask for the style note and the word count before you write, rather than negotiating them after.
The space is fixed, so the length is fixed
Print does not reflow. You bought so many columns by so many centimetres, and the text either fits or gets cut, and it gets cut from the bottom.
The bottom is where owners put the address and the phone number. So take them out of the flowing copy and put them in a contact box the layout has to keep. Then write to the exact word count the paper gave you, and give them one paragraph marked as the one to drop if it runs long.
Write the headline to their measure too. A headline written to fit a screen breaks over three lines in a four-column space and looks wrong on the page.
The picture and the quote do the work
Newsprint is absorbent, the ink spreads, and the picture prints darker and greyer than it looks on your screen. An interior photograph of a showroom, shot in the evening, arrives as a black rectangle with a logo in it.
Send a picture with strong contrast and one clear subject, taken in daylight where possible, at the resolution the paper asks for. A person doing something specific beats a building. A machine in use beats the machine parked. A group photograph with eleven people in a line is the most common thing sent and the least readable at newsprint size.
Magazines and news portals print better, so the same rule loosens. Ask which you are in before you shoot.
The quote is the other half of it, and it is what makes the page read as journalism. It also has to be true. Somebody named, with a designation, said something they are prepared to see in print.
Get it from them in writing, show them the final wording, and keep that approval. If the quote is from a customer, the same applies, and they may reasonably ask what the sentence is going to sit next to.
Regulated businesses get a third check. A hospital, a clinic, a financial adviser or a coaching centre is bound by its own council's rules on what may be claimed in public, and a promotional feature is public. Your compliance adviser decides the wording before the paper sees it.
What belongs in each part of the page
| Part | What it carries |
|---|---|
| Label | Advertorial, promotional feature or sponsored, at the top, in the paper's standard style |
| Headline | The news, in the paper's voice, at the paper's measure |
| Opening paragraph | What happened, who did it, where, and when. No build-up |
| Body | The background, the detail that takes explaining, one number you can stand behind |
| Quote | A named person, with a designation, saying something a person would say |
| Picture and caption | One clear subject, high contrast, named in the caption |
| Contact box | Address, phone, web address, hours. Outside the flowing text |
Buy it for the right reason
An advertorial is good at explaining something a display advertisement has no room for. A manufacturer's new line and what it now makes. A hospital's new department and what it treats. A builder handing over a project and what came next. A family business at fifty years.
It is poor at selling a dated offer, because the label works against urgency, and poor at building credibility in the way a journalist's story does. Readers have learned what the word sponsored means.
For example, a manufacturer in Peenya opening a second unit gets more from half a page in a business daily explaining what the unit makes and for whom, than from the same money spent on a display advertisement announcing the opening.
The online version is a different product
A sponsored article on a news portal, sold as native advertising, is bought by the page rather than by the column centimetre, so length is no longer the constraint. Three other things are.
The page lives at a web address the publisher controls and can take down when the contract ends. The links in it pass no ranking value. And it will be read by people who arrived from a social feed rather than from the front page, so the headline has to work on its own.
Ask for the period in writing, and take a PDF of the printed page and a screenshot of the online one the day it appears. That copy is the thing you will actually use, in a proposal, on a wall in the office, and in the folder a customer is handed.
What to do next
Decide what the news is before you write a word. If you cannot finish the sentence "this week, our business did this", buy a display advertisement instead and keep the advertorial for when you can. Get the word count, the style note and the picture specification from the paper first, and write the contact box separately.
We write the feature, deal with the desk and book the space through our newspaper advertising work, and the publication invoices you for the space directly. If you are choosing between a promotional feature, a display advertisement and a fortnight of radio for the same budget, that is a media decision, and the free audit is where we would take it apart with you.