"Innehållet presenteras i samarbete med..." : En något experimentell enkätstudie om attityder till native advertising och hur det påverkar konsumenters förtroende för nyheter och företag

Sammanfattning: Current marketing discourse seems to be less and less about communicating to customers, and more and more about communicating with customers. Concurrently, traditional news companies are in a bit of a crisis where their business models are failing to compete with the growing colossus of “free” news that circulates the web. In the aftermath of all this, native advertising – an umbrella term for advertisements that look like editorial content – has emerged like a panacea. But while native advertisements might be effective where traditional advertisements are not, they also create a problematic ambiguity for the consumer – what is marketing and what is news? This thesis set off to investigate whether consumers perceive native advertisements as advertisements and how that might affect their trust towards the advertiser (company) and platform (news site). A questionnaire with a slightly experimental touch was constructed from various theoretical focal points; 207 respondents were exposed to three different types of native advertisements and then answered statements about how they perceived them on a 7-point Likert scale. The majority of the respondents considered all three of the native advertisements as sponsored content, with regard to some notable disparities between the examples. However, not all of them did; in one case, as much as 27 % stated they did not perceive the advertisement as sponsored content at all. There was also a unanimous preference towards traditional advertisements, particularly among those who felt they had a hard time distinguishing native advertisements from editorial content, and frequent occurrence of sponsored content on a news site weakened its general credibility among the respondents, as well as their trust in both advertiser and platform. This study is more exploratory than conclusive and should be interpreted as such, but from these results it seems that stakeholders should tread a lot more carefully when using native advertisements compared with traditional advertisements – particularly considering how they have become an industry norm in an almost dogmatic fashion. The consequences may not be as direct as a wound up CTR-ratio or increased advertising revenue, but trust is simply a too valuable currency to gamble with in an era filled with ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’.