Native Advertising: Effective or Misleading?

In recent years, the use of native advertising has increased on news websites. Native advertising has developed into a popular advertising tool and can play a significant role in gaining a competitive advantage. Native advertising is seen as the answer to banner advertisements, which consumers perceive as disturbing and disruptive. Consequently, consumers avoid banner advertisement by using ad blockers. This leads to lower advertisement revenue for news websites, which is unfavourable. Hence, native advertising is proposed as the solution, as it is not seen by consumers as disturbing and disruptive. However, some scholars argue that the success of native advertising relates to the consumers’ inability to distinguish native advertising from the news website’s own content. Furthermore, research about disclosure types and native advertising success is scarce. Hence, the aim of this research is to study three different disclosure positions in addition to no disclosure and to examine the effects on the purchase intention. Furthermore, this study involves the measurement of perceived deception to determine whether it influences the relationship between the different positions of disclosure and the purchase intention. An online experiment (N =120) was conducted to reconstruct the appearance of a native advertisement. The findings of this study indicate that while consumers feel more deceived when reading a native advertisement, the position of the disclosure does not affect this feeling of deception or the purchase intention. In addition, the findings indicate that when a strong feeling of deception is perceived while reading the native advertisement, it negatively influences the purchase intention. While no significant results are found in this study, the findings tentatively suggest the use of a strong and prominent disclosure in native advertising to inform consumers about the origin of the advertisers, which is also supported by the literature. This could potentially help consumers feel less deceived and create a higher purchase intention. The results of this study can serve as a foundation for future studies that aim to research the success of native advertising and the effects of disclosure. Furthermore, it is suggested to examine the brand attitude of the brand featured in the native advertising, to determine if a certain attitude effects the perceived deceptiveness or the purchase intention. In addition, this study discusses managerial implications and suggestions for future research.