  How can we distinguish commercial from editorial content in news, or more
specifically, differentiate between advertorials and regular news articles? An
advertorial is a commercial message written and formatted as an article, making
it harder for readers to recognize these as advertising, despite the use of
disclaimers. In our research we aim to differentiate the two using a machine
learning model, and a lexicon derived from it. This was accomplished by
scraping 1.000 articles and 1.000 advertorials from four different Dutch news
sources and classifying these based on textual features. With this setup our
most successful machine learning model had an accuracy of just over $90\%$. To
generate additional insights into differences between news and advertorial
language, we also analyzed model coefficients and explored the corpus through
co-occurrence networks and t-SNE graphs.
