There's THE TRUTH and the truth (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc6tmYYhOUU if you haven't seen that Simpsons episode).

Let's say that I do an hour-long infomercial on a product and I try and make the infomercial look as much like content as I can. In fact, it's not just about the product. We talk about the news and weather as well. You watch 30 minutes of it and don't notice that at the end it says that it was sponsored. I clearly said it was sponsored. Just because you stopped watching before then isn't my fault, right?

John Oliver did a great segment on this on sponsored content on local news: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIi_QS1tdFM

Google's search results used to use a different background color and borders to distinguish ads from organic results. Now they simply put "Ad" near the paid result. That makes it harder to detect what is an ad and what isn't an ad. I'm not saying that Google is being deceitful. However, they're certainly trying to make the fact that it's an ad less noticeable.

If I put photoshopped mockups of a product on a page and then note in the description that they're not actually photos of the product, is that deceitful? That's certainly getting closer to the line (and I'd say crossing it) given extra distance.

Amazon has made choices to make the "sponsored" tag less noticeable. It's a light gray and not bold so that it blends in against the background while your eye is drawn to the much larger 45% larger font-size and bold text next to it. Amazon could have chosen to make the "sponsored" tag larger, with better contrast, and bold. They made choices to make it less noticeable.

The FTC's guidelines are vague because "clear" is a vague term. If you're looking for it, it's definitely there. If you're just browsing products, do you miss it? In fact, if I search for "waffle iron", I see one large result at the top where the content stops half way through the page. My eyes then go down to the next result. The "sponsored" tag is way off on the right, half a page away from the result I was looking at. Frankly, if I weren't looking for it, I'd probably miss it.

Commercials are something that consumers instantly notice as a paid format and they discount the message to an extent. As the John Oliver segment points out, when sponsored content looks nearly identical to regular content, it carries a lot of weight. It's harder for you to filter it out. Amazon doesn't want you to look at sponsored results and think "ugh, an ad. Clearly this company isn't good enough on its own." They want it to seem like an organic result - even if you end up seeing the sponsored tag.

I actually think that Google Shopping is very different. Google Shopping presents me with a carousel of ads at the top. They're smaller and scroll to the right. It's a different format than the organic results. Once I've identified that, every time I use Google Shopping I can just skip those if I want. I might need to learn that format for Google Shopping, but they are clearly identifiable even without looking for the "Ads" text. Google Shopping even sets the ads apart from organic results with a horizontal line that clearly separates ad space from organic space. Amazon's sponsored results often have the same size/shape/format as their organic results with nothing distinguishing them beyond the "sponsored" label. Again, I'm not saying it's deceitful, but they certainly want it to be harder to distinguish their advertisements from organic content.

As I've pointed out, it's not just Amazon and even local news is falling prey to this. "Clearly" marking something as an ad leaves a lot of room for interpretation. When Terry Crews hawks Old Spice in a commercial, I know what's going on. It's an ad. When a local news show talks about a product, it's easy for it to feel genuine. When Google put ads in different colored boxes, it was easy to see that they were ads. They're still labeled as ads, but it's a lot more subtle and a lot easier to mistake for an organic result if you're just trying to do something quickly.

Is it deceitful? I don't think so. Is it less clear than Google Shopping? Yes. Are they hoping that it won't be as clear to people as it could be? Yes. They could make it more clear which results were sponsored by taking steps like giving them a different background color, by having the sponsored text as large as the neighboring text, bolded, and black rather than gray.