Den sämsta målgruppen att lura? : En studie av unga nyhetskonsumenters attityder till native advertising

Sammanfattning: With the increased volume of commercial content online, some news sites have adopted so-called native advertising on their websites to convey marketing messages more discreetly. As an increased share of advertising budgets is spent on this form of advertising this essay aims to examine its news consumer’s attitudes towards the phenomenon. The research was carried out through a qualitative study where news consumers discussed their attitudes in two separate focus groups. This was analyzed with the help of the previous studies Advertisement - an uninvited guest? and Banner Blindness as well as theories including theory of science hermeneutics, reception analysis, convergence culture, brand schema, advertising schema and ad- brand attitude.The results show that in most cases native advertising is met with indifferent attitudes but in some cases also confusion, which could lead to negative attitudes towards the ad and the news site. The respondents mostly had a scientism towards native ads but because they don´t intend to pay for their news their attitudes are more indifferent than negative. However most of the respondents experienced a so called third-person effect which means that they think they’re not affected by ads, but others are. They say that their generation is the hardest group to fool. Thus this thesis concludes that the most favorable ads were technology- and channel driven, which is a form of semi native ads. This is making it a little less native and more recognizable as a commercial message