https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0167-7323
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Abstract
Digital news is progressively blurring with commercial content at the same time that mobile technology is increasingly being used to access news. To understand if these trends affect ability to distinguish news from covert advertising, two experiments were conducted among U.S. adults examining whether viewing content on a mobile device versus computer interacts with motivation levels in affecting recognition of native advertising. Consistent with tenets of the Covert Advertising Recognition and Effects model, results show that although people with greater motivation to process media content were more likely to recognize native advertising, it was not enough to compensate for the greater cognitive effort required when using a mobile device.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the research assistance of Brittany Brown, Zicheng (Claire) Cheng, Aeric Holbrook, Nitya Ravi, and Yuhui (Irene) Zhu. I also thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. Underlying research materials are available upon request.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Participants in the pilot study were a subset of a larger project related to how people process native advertising disclosures (Amazeen Citation2020). The sourceless article about sushi (360 words) was used as a control article as in other studies (Banas and Miller Citation2013; Richards, Banas, and Magid Citation2017). For consistency, the article was again used in study two. There were no procedures from the larger study that could have affected the outcome measures in the present study.
2 Formerly referred to as “customized” (Einstein Citation2016) native advertisements, the IAB (Citation2019) now defines branded/native content ads as “paid content from a brand that is published in the same format as full editorial on a publisher’s site, generally in conjunction with the publisher’s content teams themselves.”
3 All analyses were conducted using SPSS v.24.
4 To foster understanding of the importance of generating new knowledge, students are provided the opportunity to participate in various research activities of their choice from focus groups, surveys, and experiments to attending research lectures. Guidelines are followed to ensure voluntariness, avoid undue influence, preserve confidentiality and anonymity, and avoid coercion.
5 The device manipulation was not integrated into a full factorial design as it would have doubled the number of conditions required. A chi-square analysis indicates there were no significant differences between condition and device type (χ2 = 7.06, p = .216).