#Sponsored, #Advertisement, or nothing?

The goal of this thesis was to answer the following research question: To what extent does the wording of sponsored content disclosures have an impact on consumers' ad recognition and their attitudinal persuasion knowledge towards an advertisement on Instagram compared to TikTok? These two platforms are popular among users and marketers, and generate a great deal of sponsored content. This type of content has a commercial intent that consumers may not always be aware of, which has raised concerns among the European Parliament regarding consumer protection. By using disclosures, such as #advertisement, legislators have tried to make it easier for consumers to recognize the commercial intend behind the content, and act upon it, which are the two pillars of the Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM). This model is concerned with consumers ability to recognize an advertisement and act upon it, which is a skill that consumers learn over time by being exposed to other advertisements. This thesis used an experimental design to measure the ad recognition and attitudinal persuasion knowledge of participants after being shown a short video that was either presented on the interface of TikTok or Instagram, and that included either one of the following three disclosure options: #advertisement, #sponsored, or no disclosure. Participants were also asked for their motives to use a platform. These results were used to understand the impact of Instagram and TikTok on PKM. Besides measuring the relation between disclosures and PKM, the study also tested the impact of endorser attitude and brand attitude on PKM, as previous research found both attitudes to be related to PKM. The key finding of this study is that PKM on these platforms may be developing. This can be ascribed to the fact that the ad recognition of participants was found to be impacted more by seeing a brand displayed in the video than by seeing a disclosure. However, no difference between Instagram and TikTok was found, as both platforms were used with the same motive, meaning that consumers respond similarity to brand related content on both TikTok and Instagram.