Recognizing Native Ads as Advertising: Attitudinal and Behavioral Consequences

• Published date: 01 December 2019
• Author: Soontae An,Gayle Kerr,Hyun Seung Jin
• Date: 01 December 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joca.12235

WINTER 2019 VOLUME 53, NUMBER 4 1421

SOONTAE AN, GAYLE KERR, AND HYUN SEUNG JIN

Recognizing Native Ads as Advertising:

Attitudinal and Behavioral Consequences

This study assessed consumers’ initial reactions to in-feed native ads

appearing as news content. In particular, it focuses on consumers’

recognition of advertising when they realize that content they had

thought were news stories had in fact been advertising. Recognition

of advertising made consumers infer that advertisers had deliberately

manipulated them. Consequently, consumers engaged less with the

message, had less positive attitudes toward the brand, and were less

likely to purchase and share. The resultsdemonstrated the mechanisms

through which the two mediators, manipulative intent and message

engagement, lowered brand attitude, purchase intention, and sharing

intention. In addition, ad disclosure made more people recognize the ad

when they were exposed to it than when it was not disclosed as an ad.

Native ads merge products, promotional messages, and platforms, often

looking and sounding like news content. In particular, when native ads

are presented as social media in-feed units, the distinction between ads

and platform content becomes less clear. This can be further exasperated

because, despite Facebook signaling “Suggested Posts” and Twitteridenti-

fying “Promoted Tweets,” many native ads on social media do not provide

any type of disclosure (An, Kang, and Koo 2018). Whether people are able

to recognize these native ads as advertising at rst glance and how this

awareness affects their subsequent response are unclear and unresolved

issues for consumer protection. In particular, how consumers react after

feeling deceived about the information source and to what extent sponsor-

ship disclosures play a role is a worthy area of investigation for consumer

protection and marketing practice.

This important issue of disclosure has become more and more visible,

while native advertising itself has seamlessly blended into online platforms

(eMarketer 2017; Levi 2015; Wojdynski 2016; Wojdynski and Evans

2016). Native ads that provide minimal or no sponsorship disclosure

Soontae An (soontae@ewha.ac.kr) is a Professor in the Division of Communication and Media at

Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea. Gayle Kerr (gf.kerr@qut.edu.au) is a Professor and Hyun

Seung Jin (hs.jin@qut.edu.au) is a Senior Lecturer at the QUT Business School, Brisbane, Australia.

We thank the editor, Ron Hill, and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and

guidance.

The Journal of Consumer Affairs, Winter 2019: 1421–1442

DOI: 10.1111/joca.12235

Copyright 2018 by The American Council on Consumer Interests

1422 THE JOURNAL OF CONSUMER AFFAIRS

often trick consumers into viewing their content without revealing their

sources. Lazauskas (2014) found that 67% of respondents felt deceived

after discovering that native ads that looked like news had actually been

written by an advertiser. Further, when disclosure labels are offered as a

means to identify commercial intent, there is little understanding of how

consumers interpret and respond to such disclosure (Wojdynski 2016).

Although scholars warn of the downside effects of highly ambiguous native

ads (Campbell and Marks 2015; Lee, Kim, and Ham 2016; Wojdynski

2016; Wojdynski and Evans 2016), few empirical studies have explored

consumers’ psychological reactions, especially after they are misled.

The current study focuses on a fast-evolving and potentially deceptive

form of native advertising that uses in-feed units, often referred to as spon-

sored content, on social media and news platforms. These ads, often dis-

guised as news stories, tend to showcase their brands with eye-catching

visuals or intriguing stories to minimize the increasing advertising avoid-

ance (see Kelly, Kerr, and Drennan 2010). The purpose of this study is

to explore the extent to which consumers’ engagement with the message

decreased once the manipulation was uncovered and whether provision of

a disclosure, such as the label “Advertisement,” could make a difference.

This study expands upon Wojdynski’s (2016) work around perceived

deceptiveness as a mediator between ad recognition and attitudinal

responses, indicating that less deception could enhance attitudes toward

native ads. Because correct understanding of commercial intent upon

exposure can mitigate negative consequences, a critical determinant of

the deceptiveness of native advertising is whether consumers recognize

the commercial nature upon initial exposure. If the type or source of

information is not congruent with their initial beliefs, consumers feel

manipulated, which negatively inuences persuasion effects (Lunardo and

Mbengue 2013). Therefore, this study investigated the consequences of

not recognizing native ads as advertising at rst glance.

This article makes a further contribution as it mirrors an important

change in native advertising—its adaption for mobile devices. While most

previous work has investigated native advertising as static display adver-

tisements, this article explores in-feed native advertising, which accounts

for $US18.59 billion, or 84.2% of all US native display advertising (eMar-

keter 2017). While much of this growth is social media in-feed advertising,

largely on Facebook, the advances in programmatic buyingand the increas-

ing number of non-social publishers adopting in-feed native advertising

signal it as both an escalating area of practice and one that raises critical

concerns for consumer protection. Finally, this study looks at the ethical

issues beyond this practice, exploring Taylor’s (2017) claim that native