The Growth of Covert Advertising in the Context of Local Self-Government

Abstract

Advertising has become an indispensable component of the modern information society. The advertisers try to attract attention, often with aggressive and unethical advertising; one aspect being covert advertising. Covert advertising means all the texts are paid for in the forms of journalistic texts but they want just the commercial benefit. Our goal was to investigate covert advertising within the Slovenian press, with a mutually comparative analysis of three daily newspapers comparing the years 2008 and 2012, and to study the existing theoretical contributions on covert advertising in the context of local self-government as a key element of democracy, its causes, and the legal order. We determined that the number of such articles is growing each year, and the laws and regulations are absolutely disrespected.