Advertising Recognition

Advertising Recognition

Reviewed by Faisal Zaidi

Advertising recognition is whether a reader identifies a piece of content as paid. In two separate nationally representative United States samples, run by Michelle A. Amazeen and Bartosz W. Wojdynski, fewer than one in ten participants managed it. That is the prior failure underneath the whole disclosure debate, because most readers never get as far as having a reaction to the label at all.

What it is

The construct comes out of Wojdynski and Nancy J. Evans's experiments on sponsored news articles, which tested the position of a disclosure and the words used in it. Middle or bottom positioning, and wording using "advertising" or "sponsored", increased recognition compared with the alternatives, and visual attention mediated the relationship between position and recognition. The headline figure usually quoted, that only 17 of 242 viewers identified the content as advertising, is from the University of Georgia's own account of the study rather than from the paper, whose abstract carries no figure, and it is attributed that way here. The same release reports that readers were seven times more likely to identify an article as advertising when the label used "advertising" or "sponsored content" rather than "brand voice" or "presented by".

In effect

Recognition is the event that everything downstream depends on. In Wojdynski's experiment with 343 participants, recognition led to lower perceptions of article quality, a worse attitude towards the sponsor and a lower intention to share the article, with the effect on attitudes running mainly through activated persuasion knowledge and perceived deceptiveness. In Amazeen and Wojdynski's representative sample of 800 adults, the participants who did recognise the content came away with a lowered opinion of the publisher and of the institution of advertising overall. In their representative sample of 738, recognition was most likely among younger and more educated readers who used news for informational purposes, and it led to more counterarguing.

What it does not say

It does not say recognition is improving. Nothing in reach measures the same thing twice over time, so the obvious objection that readers have simply got used to the format is untested, and Amazeen's later work on mobile found that greater motivation to process content was not enough to compensate for the extra cognitive effort a phone demands. It does not say the recognition rates belong to the journals that published them, since the best-known percentage comes from a press release and the second study's figure is given as 17 per cent in that release and as a different number in a secondary summary, a disagreement left unresolved here rather than printed. And it does not say that recognising a label is the same as understanding what it means, which is a separate event with a separate literature.

Sources

  1. Wojdynski, B. W., & Evans, N. J. (2016). "Going Native: Effects of Disclosure Position and Language on the Recognition and Evaluation of Online Native Advertising." Journal of Advertising, 45(2), 157-168. doi:10.1080/00913367.2015.1115380. Abstract read in full; full text paywalled and not read. Note the DOI carries 2015, not 2016.
  2. Freeman, S. (2015). UGA Today, 16 December 2015, the University of Georgia's own account of the study above, and the source of the figure of 17 of 242 viewers and of the position percentages.
  3. Wojdynski, B. W. (2016). "The Deceptiveness of Sponsored News Articles: How Readers Recognize and Perceive Native Advertising." American Behavioral Scientist, 60(12), 1475-1491. doi:10.1177/0002764216660140. N = 343.
  4. Amazeen, M. A., & Wojdynski, B. W. (2020). "The effects of disclosure format on native advertising recognition and audience perceptions of legacy and online news publishers." Journalism, 21(12), 1965-1984. doi:10.1177/1464884918754829. Representative sample of 800 United States adults; published online 2018.
  5. Amazeen, M. A., & Wojdynski, B. W. (2019). "Reducing Native Advertising Deception: Revisiting the Antecedents and Consequences of Persuasion Knowledge in Digital News Contexts." Mass Communication and Society, 22(2), 222-247. doi:10.1080/15205436.2018.1530792. Nationally representative sample of 738 United States adults.
  6. Amazeen, M. A. (2021). "Native Advertising in a Mobile Era: Effects of Ability and Motivation on Recognition in Digital News Contexts." Digital Journalism, 11(6), 1130-1153. doi:10.1080/21670811.2020.1860783. Published online 2021, in volume 11 issue 6. Sample sizes not established and none is printed.