The effects of sponsorship disclosures, advertising knowledge, and message involvement in sponsored influencer posts

Abstract

Influencers are required to make disclosures while posting sponsored content on social media. This study examined what kind of disclosures are effective and how prominent disclosures interact with advertising knowledge and message involvement to affect the recognition of sponsored influencer posts on Instagram. It conducted an online experiment (N = 296) with a 2 (disclosure type: prominent vs. subtle) × 2 (advertising knowledge: enhanced vs. not enhanced) x 2 (message involvement: high vs. low) between-subjects factorial design. Results revealed that people with enhanced advertising knowledge or with high message involvement led to greater advertising recognition, regardless of the degree of disclosure prominence. While on the other hand, when people’s knowledge of sponsored influencer content was not enhanced or when they were low in message involvement, the prominent disclosure was more effective than the subtle one in improving advertising recognition. Furthermore, recognizing sponsored content elicited resistance, which in turn led to less favourable attitude towards the brand. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings were discussed.

Keywords:

• Sponsorship disclosures
• influencer content
• advertising knowledge
• message involvement
• resistance

Acknowledgments

This work is part of the author’s dissertation study. The author would like to thank Drs. Fuyuan Shen, Michael Schmierbach, Denise Bortree, and Frank Dardis for their guidance and support. The author would also like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This study also measured purchase intention. It was found to be highly positively correlated with brand attitude, r = .997, n = 296, p < .01.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Guolan Yang

Guolan Yang is an Assistant Professor of Advertising at Oakland University. She earned herPh.D. degree in mass communications from the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communicationsat Penn State. Her research interests include digital advertising and strategic communications.