The Role of Transparency and Perceived Deceptiveness in Consumer Evaluations of Native Advertising

• In Event: News vs. Native Advertising: Perspectives in Journalism Research

Abstract

A number of studies in the past two years have shown that readers' recognition of native advertising formats -- from blog posts to sponsored news -- as paid advertising leads generally to more negative reader evaluations of the content itself, the publisher, and the advertiser. This phenomenon can in part be attributed to increased scrutiny of message content based on persuasion knowledge activation. However, recent evidence shows that readers who view the advertiser as being more transparent evaluate native ads more favorably than those who think that advertisement was misleading or tricky to discern. News media have struggled to negotiate the degree of transparency and the expected efficacy of the native ad campaigns. This paper discusses how the concept of sponsorship transparency combined with different configurations of message design characteristics affect readers' perceptions of sponsorship transparency, and its role in shaping perceptions of the publisher and the advertiser.

Author

• Bartosz Wojtek Wojdynski, U of Georgia