Reducing Native Advertising Deception: Revisiting the Antecedents and Consequences of Persuasion Knowledge in Digital News Contexts

By Michelle A. Amazeen, Bartosz W. Wojdynski. Mass Communication & Society, 2018

87 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Building on the persuasion knowledge model, this study examines how audience characteristics and native advertising recognition influence the covert persuasion process. Among a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults (N = 738), we examined digital news readers’ recognition of a sponsored news article as advertising. Although fewer than 1 in 10 readers recognized the article as advertising, recognition was most likely among younger, more educated consumers who engaged with news media for informational purposes. Recognition led to greater counterarguing, and higher levels of informational motivation also led to less favorable evaluations of the content among recognizers. News consumers were most receptive to native advertising in a digital news context when publishers were more transparent about its commercial nature. Beyond theoretical insights into the covert persuasion process, this study offers practical utility to the advertisers, publishers, and policymakers who wish to better understand who is more likely to be confused by this type of advertising so that they can take steps to minimize deception.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Literature and Literary Theory, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5432ebe605c8d171d58aba895510fe4e52e189a8

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Citations in the corpus

Hidden Incentives for Auto-Induced Distributional Shift (2020, background): “The situation is further complicated by peoples’ inability to distinguish promoted content from real news - Amazeen & Wojdynski (2018) ﬁnd that fewer than 1/10 people were able to tell when content was an advertisement, even when it was explicitly labelled as such.”
The Covert Advertising Recognition and Effects (CARE) model: Processes of persuasion in native advertising and other masked formats (2020, background): “When they do not detect that it’s a paid advertisement, there’s evidence they largely receive it like organic content (Amazeen and Wojdynski 2018; Cole and Greer 2013; Hoofnagle and Meleshinsky 2015).”