Editorial Trust

What it is

In Michelle A. Amazeen and Bartosz W. Wojdynski's representative sample of 800 United States adults, the readers who did recognise an article as paid came away with a lowered opinion both of the publisher and of advertising as an institution. In Anocha Aribarg and Eric M. Schwartz's studies a plain display advertisement, the obvious and ignorable kind, produced more visual attention, more brand recognition and more trust in the website than a native one did. So the brand loses attitude and purchase intention, the publisher loses the reader's good opinion, and the institution of advertising loses credibility, from a single event.

In effect

That leaves the publisher with a genuine trade-off rather than a moral choice with an obvious answer. The same representative research that measures the cost also finds readers most receptive to native advertising where publishers are transparent about its commercial nature, so the honest setting is both the expensive one and the one readers say they want. Aribarg and Schwartz put a price on the other side of it, since a native advertisement generates a higher click-through rate precisely because it resembles the editorial content around it.

What it does not say

It does not say the format reliably destroys trust. The negative effect of native format on website trustworthiness appeared in Aribarg and Schwartz's first study only among participants who clicked the advertisement, the main effect appeared in their second study but not their first, and neither their field experiment nor its pretest detected the native-against-display format effects at all. The brand-recognition effect found in the first study also disappeared under repeated exposure in the second. The authors do not report their paper as a clean win for either side, and neither does this page.

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