Make-up Reviews on YouTube: The effect of the context of videos on the effectiveness of native advertising

In recent years, companies have flocked towards alternative, modern media to advertise and market their products. Social media provides the perfect opportunity to target particular audiences and niche markets, as they often consist of thousands of communities with similar interest. One of the communities that is of a particularly vast size is the beauty community that exists on the video-sharing platform YouTube. Companies compensate YouTubers for talking about their brand by sending them products or sponsoring a video. The main problem that arises with this is that these advertisements can be deceptive in nature, as the audience is often not informed about the existence of the sponsorships. Editorial content like this is often extremely hard to recognize. Many governments and even some YouTubers have acknowledged the possible dangers of this type of native advertising, and urge these creators to more distinctly disclose the sponsorships whenever they can as this could possibly help the consumer to make a more informed decision that is free of deception. However, as consumers can often be resistant towards advertising, a disclosure can also have some negative effects on advertising effectiveness and credibility. An online survey-experiment (N = 258) examined whether these assumptions were true. This was done through the use of different titles and description boxes in the same YouTube video, which each presented a different type of disclosure, or lack thereof. The findings of this study indicated that advertising effectiveness was not affected by the contents of the description box, nor by different titles. The additional analyses that were conducted suggested that there is indeed a relationship between advertising effectiveness and sponsorship disclosure, but it is still unclear how this relationship is exactly formed. These findings are in line with the scarce amount of existing literature, which is still inconclusive about the true effects of sponsorship disclosures as different studies state opposite things. Future research should focus on clarifying how exactly sponsorship disclosures, in the various forms that they exist in, affect consumer behaviors and opinions. This could help regulatory bodies, YouTubers and companies alike to establish more ethical ways of advertising, whilst still supporting commercial interests.