Covert advertisements, or those that utilize the guise and delivery mechanisms of familiar non-advertising formats, differ from other more direct forms of advertising in several ways that are ...important for understanding users' psychological responses. Research across various covert advertising formats including various forms of sponsored editorial content, other native advertising formats, and product placement has shown that variation consumers' persuasive responses to such messages is largely driven by whether they recognize that such messages are advertising at all. After reviewing the findings of empirical research into covert advertising effects, we present a model of covert advertising recognition effects (CARE) that outlines potential antecedents and processes underlying the recognition of covert advertising, and maps several pathways to persuasive outcomes that are contingent on advertising recognition and perceptions related to the information in and perceived presentation of the advertisement itself.
Despite recent industry attention, questions remain about how native advertising is perceived and processed by consumers. Two experiments examined effects of language and positioning in native ...advertising disclosures on recognition of the content as advertising, effects of recognition on brand and publisher evaluations, and whether disclosure position affects visual attention. Findings show that middle or bottom positioning and wording using "advertising" or "sponsored" increased advertising recognition compared to other conditions, and ad recognition generally led to more negative evaluations. Visual attention mediated the relationship between disclosure position and advertising recognition. Theoretical, practical, and regulatory implications for disclosures in native advertising are discussed.
This experiment with a representative sample of US adults (N = 800) examines the effects of disclosure design characteristics in sponsored news on readers’ ability to recognize such content as paid ...advertising, and examines whether such recognition differently affects perceptions of legacy and digital-first publishers. Although fewer than 1 in 10 participants were able to recognize native advertising, our study shows that effectively designed disclosure labels facilitate recognition. However, participants who did recognize native advertising had lessened opinions of the publisher and the institution of advertising, overall.
Although recent scholarship has shown that congruency between editorial content and display advertising on web pages can lead to favourable outcomes for the advertiser, it is unclear whether these ...gains for advertisers come at the expense of users' ability to process the content. To examine whether contextual in-page advertising distracts users during information processing, a 2 (target message argument type: weak/strong) × 2 (ad relevance: high/low) between-subjects factorial experiment (N = 99) examined how readers of a news article about risks associated with texting while driving (a) paid attention to the article, (b) paid attention to the advertisements, and (c) were persuaded by the article contents. Participants' visual attention was captured unobtrusively using a device-mounted eye-tracking device. The findings show that readers were more likely to be persuaded by weaker arguments when the article was presented alongside highly relevant display ads than when the article was presented alongside less relevant ads. Readers also paid greater attention to relevant ads than irrelevant ads, and, surprisingly, readers in the strong argument condition paid more attention to the story content when it was presented alongside relevant ads. The implications for theories of visual attention and for online content publishers are discussed.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Sponsored news is a form of native advertising that has engendered much hope as a solution for digital publishing revenue woes, but also much concern about whether the average consumer can discern ...its advertising nature. Recent U.S. federal guidelines and industry recommendations preach clear and conspicuous labeling of sponsored news articles, but little is known about how individual readers interpret these labels, and how their interpretation shapes their understanding of article content. The present study contributes knowledge to the former areas by presenting the results of a between-subjects experiment (N = 343) that tested the effects of four disclosure characteristics (proximity, visual prominence, wording clarity, and logo presence) on recognition of the sponsored content as advertising, and by analyzing the psychological process through which such recognition influences perceptions of the article and the sponsor. The results show that while logo presence and visual prominence increase the odds of recognition, logo presence also increases misperception of the disclosure label as a stand-alone display advertisement. Recognition of the article as advertising led to decreased perceptions of article quality, attitude toward the sponsor, and intent to share the article. A serial mediation analysis shows that the effects of recognition on attitudes and intent to share are primarily mediated through conceptual persuasion knowledge activation and perceived deceptiveness of the article. Implications of these findings for practitioners and for the application of persuasion theories to covert advertising are discussed.
As advertisers continue to develop new formats of online content that blurs the line between advertising and news or entertainment, the need to understand how consumers process covert advertising ...grows. While regulators and industry practitioners agree that transparency is paramount to preventing consumer deception, there exists no established way of determining the extent to which a given message transparently conveys to consumers that is a paid advertisement. The current study makes the case for, develops, and validates a scale to measure sponsorship transparency. Following traditional scale development methods, the study generates a pool of items based on consumer and expert input, reduces the number of items based on empirical research, and evaluates scale validity and reliability using a diverse national sample.
Building on the persuasion knowledge model, this study examines how audience characteristics and native advertising recognition influence the covert persuasion process. Among a nationally ...representative sample of U.S. adults (N = 738), we examined digital news readers' recognition of a sponsored news article as advertising. Although fewer than 1 in 10 readers recognized the article as advertising, recognition was most likely among younger, more educated consumers who engaged with news media for informational purposes. Recognition led to greater counterarguing, and higher levels of informational motivation also led to less favorable evaluations of the content among recognizers. News consumers were most receptive to native advertising in a digital news context when publishers were more transparent about its commercial nature. Beyond theoretical insights into the covert persuasion process, this study offers practical utility to the advertisers, publishers, and policymakers who wish to better understand who is more likely to be confused by this type of advertising so that they can take steps to minimize deception.
•Ad personalization significantly decreased Aad and Ab.•Privacy concern mediated the negative impact of the personalized ad message on ad evaluation.•Media tasking type did not moderate the indirect ...relationships between ad personalization and ad effectiveness (i.e., Aad and Ab) through privacy concern but did moderate the direct relationship between ad personalization and ad effectiveness.
Given the increasing number of personalized ads and the prevalence of media multitasking, understanding the impact of online privacy concern on ad outcomes is important. However, the interaction effects between media multitasking and ad personalization on ad evaluation remain unexplored, including whether multitasking might lower privacy concern (i.e., cognitive performance) and improve ad evaluation and persuasion (i.e., attitudinal performance). Therefore, in the current study, we investigated the interplay between (a) level of ad personalization and (b) media multitasking and the effects of both on level of privacy concern and evaluation of the ad. We used a between-subjects experiment (N = 219) to test the effects of non-personalized and personalized advertising on online news readers, half of whom also attended to a podcast or a movie trailer while reading. Results show that the negative effect of personalized advertising on attitude toward the ad (Aad) and attitude toward the brand (Ab) emerged. Participants exposed to the more personalized ad showed less favorable Aad and Ab than those exposed to the less personalized ad. Moreover, privacy concern mediated the negative impact of the personalized ad message on ad evaluation. The results also revealed that the moderated mediation effect of multitasking on personalized advertising effectiveness through privacy concern was not significant. However, media tasking type significantly moderated the direct relationships between ad personalization and ad effectiveness (i.e., Aad and Ab). Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.
Native advertising, defined as the practice by which a marketer borrows from the credibility of a content publisher by presenting paid content with a format and location that matches the publisher's ...original content, has been the primary driving engine of the Internet marketing economy for several years. Spending on native advertising is projected to grow from $4.7 billion in 2013 to $21 billion by 2018 (Hoelzel, 2015), and advertising agencies are not only using native broadly but also hoping to increase their usage (Aldrige, 2016). While a majority of online marketing seeks to narrowly target users based on topic, through the use publication audience data, user tracking, collaborative filtering, and other techniques, native advertising not only gives users content that matches the topic of the publishers' original content but also does so by copying the format of nonpaid content. Native advertising can take a wide variety of forms, ranging from sponsored posts on social media platforms, sponsored articles and videos on sites that publish original content, and sponsored links and recommendation blocks on content providers and Web search engines.
Social media platforms have become the primary conduits to news for many consumers, yet little is known about how the content in social media posts is viewed and evaluated by consumers or how it ...shapes their decisions about selecting and sharing this information. A within-subjects eye-tracking experiment (N = 60), was conducted to examine the influence of image presence and valence on attention to and engagement with news stories on social media. Participants viewed a series of 29 social media posts of news stories, each of which was either paired with no image, a positively valenced image, or a negatively valenced image. Participants attention to the images was captured via eye tracking, and they answered dependent measures to gauge level of emotion and arousal, and intention to click and share. The results show that posts containing positive images elicited a higher level of visual attention than those with negative or no images, which led to higher intentions to click and share posts with positive images. The results provide a deeper understanding of the importance of images in driving news consumption, and offer practical implications for journalists, news organizations and groups using social media to spread a message.
