The effects of disclosure format on native advertising recognition and audience perceptions of legacy and online news publishers

This experiment with a representative sample of US adults (N=800) examines the effects of disclosure design characteristics in sponsored news on readers’ ability to recognize such content as paid advertising, and examines whether such recognition differently affects perceptions of legacy and digital-first publishers. Although fewer than 1 in 10 participants were able to recognize native advertising, our study shows that effectively designed disclosure labels facilitate recognition. However, participants who did recognize native advertising had lessened opinions of the publisher and the institution of advertising, overall.American Press Institut

Reducing Native advertising deception: revisiting the antecedents and consequences of persuasion knowledge in digital news contexts

Building on the persuasion knowledge model, this study examines how audience characteristics and native advertising recognition influence the covert persuasion process. Among a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults (N = 738), we examined digital news readers’ recognition of a sponsored news article as advertising. Although fewer than 1 in 10 readers recognized the article as advertising, recognition was most likely among younger, more educated consumers who engaged with news media for informational purposes. Recognition led to greater counterarguing, and higher levels of informational motivation also led to less favorable evaluations of the content among recognizers. News consumers were most receptive to native advertising in a digital news context when publishers were more transparent about its commercial nature. Beyond theoretical insights into the covert persuasion process, this study offers practical utility to the advertisers, publishers, and policymakers who wish to better understand who is more likely to be confused by this type of advertising so that they can take steps to minimize deception.Accepted manuscrip

Multimedia framing in U.S. newspapers' online coverage of the Iraq War

This thesis examined the utilization of multimedia by U.S. newspaper Web sites in covering the Iraq War in 2007, and its role in framing aspects of the War. A total of 201 photo galleries, audio slideshows, interactive graphics, and interactive packages were analyzed from the 100 most-visited U.S. newspaper sites. Dominant textual and visual frames were coded for each story, along with framing dimensions including main subject, time and space. The study concluded that human interest framing dominated multimedia coverage, although the extent of such framing differed between multimedia story types. Nearly three-quarters of the stories (72.1%) utilized a human interest textual frame, and 81.1 percent of stories featured a human interest visual frame. Multimedia coverage of the war primarily told the stories of individual U.S. stories and their families. The results showed that newspapers with a larger online readership were more likely to feature multimedia coverage of the war

Parsing the effects of web interactivity and navigability on information processing

Much research on the psychological impact of technological variables in online communication has focused on interactivity as a characteristic of Web sites and other digital media that subsumes many aspects of online information presentation. This dissertation sought to examine whether interactivity of Web sites could be disentangled from an often-mentioned but under-explicated technological variable, navigability. This dissertation underwent several steps to clarify the nature and effects of interactivity by extricating the variable from another characteristic of digital media, namely navigability. The main experiment employed a 3 (interactivity: low, medium, high) X 2 (navigability: low, high) between-subjects factorial experiment to examine unique contributions of interactivity and navigability to effects on attitudes, memory of site content, and behavioral intent, as well as the mechanisms by which potential effects occur. In order to examine these mechanisms, a scale to measure user perceptions of Web site navigability was also developed and tested. Navigability was found to have a main effect on memory of site content, such that participants in low-navigability conditions had lower memory of site content. In addition, navigability was found to have a significant indirect on attitudes toward the site via perceived navigability. Similarly, interactivity was found to have a significant indirect on attitudes toward the site through perceived interactivity. The implications of these effects for understanding the processes through which Web site structure can affect the processing of content are discussed

Interactive Infographics\u27 Effect on Elaboration in Agricultural Communication

In public health, politics, and advertising, interactive content spurred increased elaboration from audiences that were otherwise least likely to engage with a message. This study sought to examine interactivity as an agricultural communication strategy through the lens of the Elaboration Likelihood Model. Respondents were randomly assigned a static or interactive data visualization concerning the production of peaches and blueberries in Georgia, then asked to list their thoughts in accordance with Petty and Cacioppo’s thought-listing measure. Respondents significantly exhibited higher elaboration with the interactive message as opposed to the static, extending the results of past research in other communication realms to agricultural communication as well. This increase in attitude and cognition encourages agricultural communicators to pursue the use of more interactive elements in their messaging

Insight versus Effort. Communicating the Creative Process Leading to New Products

Studies of the creative process identify two relevant sources of new ideas and products: Insight, a sudden, dreamlike, illuminating experience; and effort, deliberate, structured, hard work. With the aim of investigating the communication of the creative process,this research proposes that consumers hold associations between insight and arts, and between effort and sciences. These lay theories induce differential evaluations of new products: consumersevaluate more favorably artistic and scientific products presented as the outcome of insight or effort, respectively. The strength of the proposed effects, however,depends on the level of consumer expertise in the relevant product domain. We maintain that,as audience expertise increases, lay theories become less relevant and the effects of creative process narratives are attenuated. Five studies support the proposed conceptual framework and showthatnarratives of thecreative process influence the evaluations of new products, depending on the product domain and on consumer expertise

Looks Real, or Really Fake? Warnings, Visual Attention and Detection of False News Articles

In recent years, online misinformation designed to resemble news by adopting news design conventions has proven to be a powerful vehicle for deception and persuasion. In a 2 (prior warning: present/absent) x 2 (article type: false/true) eye-tracking experiment, news consumers (N=49) viewed four science news articles from unfamiliar sources, then rated each article for credibility before being asked to classify each as true news or as false information presented as news. Results show that reminding participants about the existence of fake news significantly improved correct classification of false news articles, but did not lead to a significant increase in misclassification of true news articles as false. Analysis of eye-tracking data showed that duration of visual attention to news identifier elements, such as the headline, byline, timestamp on a page, predicted correct article classification. Implications for consumer education and information design are discussed

Disclosure-Driven Recognition of Native Advertising:A Test of Two Competing Mechanisms

This study aims to contribute to the literature by examining how two opposite-valanced mechanisms (activation of conceptual persuasion knowledge and perceived transparency of the native advertising) explain positive and negative effects of sponsorship disclosures on brand responses (i.e., brand attitude and purchase intentions) and by examining the role of message source. An experiment (N = 133) showed that disclosures of native advertising decreased persuasion via activated persuasion knowledge: Readers who understood that a blog post was a form of advertising due to a disclosure showed more attitudinal-persuasion knowledge, which in turn led to less positive brand attitudes and lower purchase intention. However, the disclosure also enhanced persuasion via perceptions of transparency of the blog post: due to the disclosure, the blog post was perceived as more transparent, which resulted in less attitudinal-persuasion knowledge and in more positive attitudes toward the brand and higher purchase intentions. Source did not moderate these mediation effects. By incorporating two competing mechanisms, this study offers important new insights into the theoretical mechanisms that explain advertising disclosure effects