Building a Better Native Advertising Disclosure

ABSTRACT

Past research has shown that consumers' ability to identify sponsored news articles as advertising is low. This study utilized two experiments to identify characteristics of native advertising disclosures that can lead to higher levels of recognition. An online experiment (N = 242) showed that higher levels of visual prominence in the form of size and color contrast increased advertising recognition, and that language explicitness increased recognition when visual prominence was high. An eye-tracking lab experiment (N = 90) showed that such high-visual-prominence, high-explicitness disclosures are more likely to be noticed and more likely to lead to advertising recognition when they are embedded within the story text than when they are at the absolute or relative top of the page.

KEYWORDS:

• Native advertising
• covert advertising
• persuasion knowledge model
• disclosures
• sponsored content

Notes

¹ The numbers was slightly improved in a study in which consumers were told prior to exposure that they would be evaluating whether content is or is not paid content (Hyman et al. 2017)—although even in that case only four of 16 articles were correctly identified by more than 40% of respondents.