Unraveling plot-based native advertising: Is it overpraised? - A quantitative study on Chinese consumers’ responses to plot-based native advertisements

In recent years a new type of advertising, called plot-based native advertising, became prominent in web series in China. Plot-based native advertising refers to the practice of using plots and settings from the dramas and creating scenes where characters from the dramas advertise for certain products and brands in explicit manners. It is an exclusive type of adverting in China, and it only exists in web dramas because of Chinese broadcasting regulations. Since 2016, plot-native advertising has become a hype: Practitioners believe that plot-based native ads are creative and entertaining and could generate more positive responses from the audience. Moreover, some successful examples convince the brands that these ads could help raise brand awareness to a large extent. Thus, the practitioners and the brands actively embraced this new type of advertising. As a result, making plot-based native ads in the web dramas become a common practice and the price of a single piece of plot-based native ad rose like a rocket. On the other hand, despite the fact that this new type of advertising has become extremely prevalent in web series, audience responses to it have actually never been investigated. This study investigates audience’s perceptions of the plot-based native ads (e.g., perceived ad qualities, ad attitudes) as well as their effectiveness, comparing both to the perceptions and effectiveness of more conventional forms of advertising (i.e., product placements and regular commercials). An online experiment with a one-factor between-group design was employed. The factor was ad type and it had four levels, being plot-based native ads, visual-only placements, audio-visual placements and regular commercials. The stimulus came from The Mystic Nine, the most popular web drama in China in 2016, and the show that brought plot-based native advertising to public’s attention. The target group for this study was the Chinese population aged between 18 to 35 years old, and all respondents were recruited by a professional survey platform in China. According to the experimental results, plot-based native ads did not differ significantly in terms of ad characteristics (i.e., perceived ad creativity, perceived ad entertainment, perceived ad informativeness, and perceived ad intrusiveness) and nor did they outperform in generating more positive responses from the audience (i.e., ad attitude, brand awareness, brand attitude, and purchase intention), compared with other types of advertising. In other words, the plot-based native ads are not as powerful as practitioners believe them to be. These findings are very interesting, as they indicate a huge gap between the reality and the popular “belief” in the industry. Also, these findings have several practical implications. The first one is that the practitioners should not be too optimistic about the effects of plot-based native advertising. Second, brands, especially brands which do not have a big budget, should consider carefully before using plot-based native ads: According to the results of this study, it is difficult to argue that using plot-based native ads could still bring high ROI. Finally, brands and advertisers are not advised to continue following this hype blindly and are advised to use other forms of advertising which are more economical.