Moving Towards Transparency for Native Advertisements on News Websites: A Test of More Detailed Disclosures

The Visual Boundaries of Journalism: Native Advertising and the Convergence of Editorial and Commercial Content

“…Making clear visual distinctions and increasing transparency should be an important goal for both news organizations and advertisers, as audiences favour specific cues that flag advertising. This is supported by Krouwer, Poels, and Paulussen (2020) who suggest that providing detailed disclosures about the authorship of native ads has a positive influence on the news website's credibility and that transparency does not only make readers more receptive to native ads, but it may also help to restore or sustain readers' trust in news websites.…”

“…Instead, online-only and mass-market publications tend to employ visual objects that facilitate mimicking content, while legacy and up-market outlets tend to favour transparency. This could be related to the fact that legacy media and up-market outlets have closer ties to the traditional understanding of journalism and may have a higher price to pay if they jeopardize their trust by not disclosing native ads clearly (Karlsson 2010;Krouwer, Poels, and Paulussen 2020). More importantly, what these significant differences among up-market and mass-market, digital-only and legacy, and their attempt to replicate the visual codes of journalism, is that material objects of native advertising represent the socially constructed visual identity of news and how marketers and news outlets shape them to communicate to their readers where the contours of journalism and advertising meet.…”

Resisting Covert Persuasion in Digital News: Comparing Inoculation and Reactance in the Processing of Native Advertising Disclosures and in Article Engagement Intentions

“…A more likely practical application is elaborated disclosures that scholars such as Krouwer et al (2020) have tested wherein online native articles are preceded by explanations of authorship and/or news media’s business model thereby priming audiences to consider this information as they decide whether to engage with the content. As other research has demonstrated, people respond favorably to transparency in disclosures (Amazeen & Wojdynski, 2019) feeling a greater sense of control over the choices they are faced with (Kolodinsky & Lusk, 2018) or perceiving that organizations are adhering to the implicit social contract of providing products that perform as expected (Torres et al, 2007).…”

“…However, these studies have not compared the amount of counterarguing between those exposed to only a native advertising disclosure—what Richards and colleagues (2017) may consider a limited inoculation message because it offers no refutations and is, essentially, a simple forewarning—and those who were also primed with an elaborated forewarning containing refutational messages. These potential differences are of interest in the context of efforts to develop more extensive disclosures (e.g., Krouwer et al, 2020) and to determine whether simple disclosures can release the inoculation process.…”

“… 1. Some of the negativity may be moderated over time or by the characteristics of the ad message (Beckert et al, 2020; Krouwer et al, 2020). …”