Disclosure Prominence

Disclosure Prominence

Reviewed by Faisal Zaidi

Disclosure prominence is how visible a label is, measured by its position on the page, its size, its contrast, the words it uses and whether it carries a logo. Bartosz W. Wojdynski's experiments establish which of those settings raise recognition. The field evidence from Anocha Aribarg and Eric M. Schwartz establishes the awkward part, which is that prominence and clicks trade off directly, so minimal compliance is the profitable setting.

What it is

Wojdynski's between-subjects experiment with 343 participants tested four characteristics at once: proximity, visual prominence, wording clarity and logo presence. Logo presence and prominence both increased the odds of recognition, and logo presence also increased the chance that readers mistook the disclosure label for a standalone display advertisement. On position, the University of Georgia's account of the earlier eye-tracking work reports that a disclosure at the top of the page was looked at by 40 per cent of viewers, one in the middle by 90 per cent and one at the bottom by 60 per cent, which is why the intuitive placement is the worst one.

In effect

Aribarg and Schwartz took the question into the field with a randomised experiment delivered to 138,436 subscribers of a business newsletter on a single morning in April 2017, assigning each to one of four disclosure conditions. Their finding is the one the advertising trade does not quote, that advertisers can increase clicks by making a native advertisement's legal disclosure less prominent while remaining minimally compliant with regulatory guidance. That is the commercial incentive measured at scale rather than asserted: the label that works is the label that costs money.

What it does not say

It does not say a prominent label produces understanding. The design that performed best for recognition is also the one readers most often misread as a banner, which is recognition of the wrong thing, and noticing a label is a different event from grasping what it means. It does not establish that native and display formats differ robustly either, because neither the field experiment nor its pretest detected those format effects at all, and the authors do not report their paper as a clean win for either side. And no page here rests on the eye-tracking percentages as though they were the journal's, since they come from the university's own account of the study rather than from the published paper.

Sources

  1. 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. Abstract read in full.
  2. 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. Note the DOI carries 2015.
  3. Freeman, S. (2015). UGA Today, 16 December 2015. The University of Georgia's own account of the study above, and the source of the position percentages, which are attributed to the release and not to the paper.
  4. Aribarg, A., & Schwartz, E. M. (2020). "Native Advertising in Online News: Trade-Offs Among Clicks, Brand Recognition, and Website Trustworthiness." Journal of Marketing Research, 57(1), 20-34. doi:10.1177/0022243719879711. Full text read. Study 3 was delivered to 138,436 subscribers on 19 April 2017 across four disclosure conditions. The second author declares in the paper that he is a minor investor in the newsletter that supplied the data; printed as a disclosure and nothing is inferred from it.