Sponsored Content Research Articles

Guidance for Professional Use of Social Media in Nutrition and Dietetics Practice

Guidance for Professional Use of Social Media in Nutrition and Dietetics Practice

Plastic Surgeons in TikTok: Top Influencers, Most Recent Posts, and User Engagement.

Plastic Surgeons in TikTok: Top Influencers, Most Recent Posts, and User Engagement.

Influencer Marketing as a Tool of Digital Consumer Engagement : A Systematic Literature Review

Influencer marketing is a recently emerging strategy that involves engaging people who are influential in the digital domain to share sponsored content of a brand with their followers. The purpose of this article was to review the published literature on influencer marketing, conduct a content analysis of the academic literature, and furnish a classification based on different parameters. The content analysis led to a distribution of articles as per eight different categories. This article provided the first such literature review of influencer marketing literature for the period from 2008 – 2019 to analyze and present the trends of this new marketing tactic, industries and fields involved, different platforms of social media used, key areas and methods employed by the social media influencers to connect with their followers, and spread a brand message. It was found that the major focus areas and industries utilizing social media influencers (SMIs) for brand messages and engagement of the digital consumers are lifestyles, fashion, and beauty. Empirical research was found to be predominant during the period under study. The most popular issues in the recent studies were self-presentation, para-social interactions, para-social relationships, and the credibility of the SMIs.

The Role of Parental Mediation and Persuasion Knowledge in Children’s Consumption of Unboxing Videos

Abstract: Sponsored content online, particularly content targeting young children, has increased significantly over the last decade. One such type of sponsored content is unboxing videos on YouTube that young children often watch on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Using a sample of 421 parents with children between the ages of 4 and 10, this study investigates the role of parental mediation and the influence of persuasion knowledge on such mediation when it comes to children’s consumption of unboxing videos. Results indicate that children’s consumption of unboxing videos is associated with their purchase demands and, in the absence of strict regulations online, parental mediation through higher levels of persuasion knowledge can potentially act as a line of defense in combating the persuasive effects of unboxing videos. Implications for advertisers, policy makers, and parents are drawn.

Optimal Mechanism Design in the Sponsored Content Service Market

We adopt contract theory to design a mechanism for interaction between the content provider (CP) and mobile users (MUs) with asymmetric information. To incentivize MUs to consume more content, a content scheme is proposed in which the CP provides some financial assistance to MUs. This scheme yields both the MUs and CP benefit due to gained utility and advertisement revenue in response to high data usage, respectively. We prove that a unique functional strategy exists to allocate the content demand and financial assistance based on MUs' types. This strategy satisfies the incentive compatibility, individual rationality and maximizes the CP's profit.

Global Spaces for Local Politics: An Exploratory Analysis of Facebook Ads in Spanish Election Campaigns

Sponsored content on Facebook has become an indispensable tool for implementing political campaign strategies. However, in political communication research, this channel is still unexplored due to its advertising model in which only target audiences are exposed to sponsored content. The launching of the Facebook Ad Library in May 2018 can be considered a turning point in this regard, inasmuch as it now offers users direct access to ads paid for by political parties, among other advertisers. This paper analyzes some aspects of the strategies implemented by six national parties during the campaigns running up to the two general elections held in Spain in 2019, by performing an analysis on a corpus of 14,684 ads downloaded directly from the Facebook Ad Library. It also provides evidence of the different emphasis placed by the parties on sponsored content. For its part, an analysis of ad scheduling shows how the publishing of ads was stepped up as polling day approached, while also revealing the practice of posting political content way in advance of election campaigns.

Commercial Limits to Personality: Instagram Influencers and Commoditized Content Receptivity

Social media influencers-individuals who utilize various forms of network power on social networks occupy a unique identity space. On the one hand, their network power is often tied to their social identity as creators of engaging material. On the other hand, their ability to promote commercial products and services steps outside the traditionally distinct commercial–social, occupational–personal divides. In this work, the network morphologies of influencers are explored in relation to their delivery of sponsored and non-sponsored content. This article explores how the disclosure of content as ‘sponsored’ affects audience reception. We show how that the promotion of content on social media often generates higher levels of engagement and receptiveness amongst their audience despite the platform’s assumption of organic non-commercial relationships. We find that engagement levels are highest among smaller out-degree networks. Additionally, we demonstrate that sponsored content not only returns a higher level of engagement, but that the effect of sponsorship is relatively consistent across out-degree network sizes. In sum, we suggest that social media audiences are not sensitive to commercial sponsorship when tied to identity, as long as that performance is convincing and consistent.

Sponsorship Disclosures in Online Sponsored Content: Practitioners’ Considerations

ABSTRACT Many consumers fail to identify online sponsored content as advertising. This is an ethical problem because consumers need to know when they are exposed to advertising so they can raise counterarguments. To enhance transparency, guidelines have been issued that prescribe sponsorship disclosures. However, the actual use of these disclosures is limited and inconsistent. To better understand this ethical practice, the aim of the present qualitative interview study is to provide an overview of practitioners’ considerations to use disclosures (or not) for online sponsored content. We conducted a qualitative interview study, in which we interviewed 18 practitioners representing four stakeholder groups. The study reveals a diverse, complex, and conflicting set of considerations categorized as follows: moral responsibility toward consumers, own business interests, and perceptions regarding disclosure guidelines. We interpret our findings in light of previous studies in which advertising professionals talked about ethics. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Self-regulation 2:0? A critical reflection of the European fight against disinformation

In presenting the European Democracy Action Plan (EDAP) in 2020, the European Commission pledged to build more resilient democracies across the EU. As part of this plan, the Commission announced intensified measures to combat disinformation, both through the incoming Digital Services Act (DSA) and specific measures to address sponsored content online. Ostensibly, these reforms would end the era of haphazard self-regulation that has characterized the EU response to disinformation. However, purported changes in this area are vaguely framed, and fail to address critical issues such as the regulation of harmful but lawful content. While instruments like the DSA show signs of improvement, shortcomings in this evolving framework represent a continuation of the EU's piecemeal approach to disinformation.

The ethical dimension of public relations in Europe: Digital channels, moral challenges, resources, and training

Digital communication tools and practices improve the spread and impact of organisational messages. Quite often, however, they also pose moral problems. This article examines how often public relations practitioners encounter moral issues in their day-to-day work, how they assess digital communication tools and practices in terms of ethics, and the resources on which they rely to tackle moral challenges. Four research questions were addressed in an online survey among 2,324 practitioners who work in PR departments of organisations or in PR agencies across Europe. Results show that PR practitioners face more moral challenges in their daily work than they have faced in the past. Regarding digital communication tools and practices, they report moral concerns especially related to using bots, exploiting personal data for big-data analyses, paying social media influencers, and using sponsored content. Personal values and beliefs are the most important resource for dealing with moral issues—whether because only a minority of practitioners has participated in any formal ethics training within the past three years, or because existing ethical guidelines are outdated. Results call for the development of ethical guidelines that can provide explicit advice in the area of digital communication. Furthermore, structured training programs and ethics courses in graduate programs are needed to enhance practitioners’ ethical knowledge.

The Creation of Branded Content Teams in Spanish News Organizations and Their Implications for Structures, Professional Roles and Ethics

Over the last decade, top media organizations have restructured their newsrooms and created branded content teams, or studios, devoted entirely to the production of new native advertising formats in order to leverage this business opportunity. The goal of this exploratory study is to analyse how news organizations in Spain implement this strategy and create branded content teams, changing the structure of their newsrooms and shaping the practices and roles of the editors and journalists involved. Semi-structured interviews with professionals (n = 11) who work at news outlets (n = 8) were carried out in order to explain their structural, professional and ethical challenges. The results show that branded content teams can be classified into three organizational models (integrated, autonomous and emerging) and they are usually formed by hybrid professionals, linking commercial, editorial and design practices. The study participants justify the new practice adopting the role of norm entrepreneurs. Despite the warnings and risks, the interviewees asserted that by inserting an appropriate disclaimer in these new formats, credibility and transparency are not endangered. They also believe that sponsored content will become a fundamental pillar for the business models of their news organizations.

From Peers to Professionals: Regulating Influencer Marketing in the United Arab Emirates

In their work on the regulation of social media influencers, Catalina Goanta and Sofia Ranchordás noted that the topic’s complexities involve, among other things, rethinking “the distinction between peers and professionals” (2019, 14). The United Arab Emirates in 2018 addressed this issue by essentially professionalizing what had previously often been seen as a form of “peer-to-peer” marketing. It did this by requiring official licensure for independent influencers producing sponsored content; it also affirmed the need for clear identification of the latter. While controls on social media content or e-commerce were not new in the UAE or the other Gulf Cooperation Council states, the licensing requirement marked the first such effort in the region specifically aimed at influencers (Bell 2018).[1] The UAE also recently announced that influencer activities are subject to compliance with Value Added Tax obligations, a measure discussed briefly below.

Sponsored Content Advertising in a Two-Sided Market

Sponsored content advertising, also known as native advertising, is a new ad format in which a brand’s content takes the same form and qualities of the publisher’s original content. Although many advertisers have largely embraced this new advertising format, consumers seem to react negatively toward sponsored content ads. In this paper, we present an analytical model that studies the strategic role of sponsored content advertising in a two-sided media market. We identify conditions under which competing platforms would choose sponsored content advertising over traditional advertising. Despite consumers’ negative sentiment toward sponsored content ads, they can be better off together with the advertisers when both platforms choose this ad format. In fact, we show that a certain degree of consumer disliking is necessary to make both advertisers and consumers better off with sponsored content ads. However, both competing platforms offering sponsored content ads may also result in a Prisoner’s Dilemma equilibrium outcome generating suboptimal profits. We further show that two symmetric media platforms can choose different advertising strategies, leading to an asymmetric equilibrium outcome. Lastly, we analyze how the presence of multihoming advertisers as well as an incomplete ad market coverage would affect the sponsored content ad equilibrium. This paper was accepted by Juanjuan Zhang, marketing.

Metapragmatic discourses in differentiating genres in online media

One of the possible ways to explore contextualization is through external discourses referencing the pragmatics of the discourse in question. These are known as metapragmatic discourse. The purpose of this article is to theoretically integrate the concept of metapragmatics into genre analysis and apply metapragmatic tools to the analysis of specific genres. Five YouTube videos together with their accompanying comments exhibiting metapragmatic properties were analyzed. Methodologically, the analysis relies on the textually oriented content analysis. The results indicate that placing discourses nominally relying on one and the same generic form into a certain genre may be predicated on contextual variables that may have nothing to do with said form per se. These variables, however, may be verbalized by the original author and by their audience in the form of metapragmatic markers. This may mean that for the final addressee, the “effect” of the original discourse will depend on the attribution of this discourse, based on the metapragmatic markers, to one of the “competing” genre variations emerging, as it were, in an ongoing exchange between the author and his audience. A case in point are sponsored and “honest” review genres. A second observation resides in the realm of hybrid genres. An example here is integrating sponsored content into one of the “legitimate” lifestyle-genres (“hot tips”, vlog, etc.). A fraction of the discourse community seems to view this as delegitimizing the discourse and the genre in question, while others see it as an “unfortunate insert”, which does not, however, change the genre’s overall value. This leaves the question open whether such genres should be considered new and full-fledged genres, with sponsored content being one of their integral features.

The influence of advertising on children's buying behaviour: a case study in Slovakia

Advertising is an essential tool in influencing the customer's buying behavior. However, customers tend to have various levels of understanding and decoding advertising messages. Even though children do not have purchasing power themselves, they still create a key customer segment that can influence the purchase decision of the whole family. The paper focuses on how media usage by children and their attitudes towards advertisements determines their buying behavior. The main purpose of the research is to present and describe how children's advertising literacy develops and its connection with the concept of the theory of mind. The relevance of the decision of this scientific problem is that according to several types of research, children are increasingly targeted through various advertising media. Even though their advertising literacy is not fully developed yet. However, nowadays, there is a growing importance of media in our lives and a need to socialize children as consumers because they represent a huge market for advertisers. An empirical study was carried out by designing a questionnaire filled by Slovak children between the ages of 11 and 15. The advertising impact and the degree of impact of the selected types of advertising media on children's consumer behavior were evaluated. The study involved the online method of computer-assisted web interviewing to investigate the influence of advertising media. The authors assessed the degree of the disruptive effect of the selected advertising media on children and the perception of a chosen medium within gender. The most and the least influential type of media were identified. The findings showed no significant difference within gender in the case of advertising media perception by children. The research empirically confirmed and theoretically proved commercial messages aimed at children through different kinds of traditional and electronic media. According to the results, children's buying behavior is mostly influenced by advertising on social media platforms. This type of media mostly integrates sponsored content which has a huge influence on decision making and forming future preferences. The research results can be helpful for further research of commercial messages of social media aimed at children and how those messages affect the whole family and children's future preferences.

The disclosure paradox: how persuasion knowledge mediates disclosure effects in sponsored media content

Persuasion knowledge is an established construct in the explanation of recipients’ coping with persuasive communication. It gains particular importance when persuasion attempts are covert. This is the case for sponsored content, as it closely adapts to its media environment. Hence, disclosures are employed to uncover such content as persuasion attempt. In the present study, we argue that disclosures activate different sub-dimensions of persuasion knowledge which can lead to paradoxical effects: On the one hand, disclosures increase recipients’ activation of conceptual persuasion knowledge by highlighting the persuasive intent of sponsored content. On the other hand, disclosures decrease recipients’ activation of attitudinal persuasion knowledge by making sponsored content appear less deceptive. This results in two opposing mediation effects where disclosures simultaneously increase and decrease anger through persuasion knowledge activation. The findings of two experimental studies show that these mediation effects occur consistently in the contexts of social media and blogs, while a third experiment reveals divergent findings in the context of journalistic media.

Corrigendum to: The Systems Analysis in Forest Resources Sponsored Content

Corrigendum to: The Systems Analysis in Forest Resources Sponsored Content

The role of corporate credibility and bandwagon cues in sponsored social media advertising

PurposeSponsored social media content is one of the advertising strategies that companies implement so that ads appear as native to the delivery platform without making consumers feel that they are directly targeted. Hence, the current study examines whether prominently featuring corporate information on social media ads affects how consumers perceive them. It also investigates whether an ad's evaluation metrics on Twitter (e.g. number of likes/comments) influence its persuasiveness and consumers' behavioral intentions towards the sponsoring company. Underlying cognitive and affective mechanisms through which sponsored content operates are also investigated.Design/methodology/approachA 2 (corporate credibility: low vs high) by 2 (bandwagon cues: low vs high) between-subjects experiment was conducted.FindingsThe findings showed that corporate credibility and bandwagon cues can influence social media ad effectiveness. Sponsored content from high-credibility companies – evoked more favorable attitudes and behavioral intentions – is perceived as less intrusive, and elicits less anger than equivalent posts from low-credibility companies. Furthermore, it was found that bandwagon cues work via different pathways. For high-credibility corporations, a high number of bandwagon cues improved ad persuasiveness by mitigating consumers' anger towards intrusive sponsored content. Conversely, for low-credibility corporations high bandwagon cues enhanced ad persuasiveness, and this triggered more positive attitudes towards it.Originality/valueThis paper is the first to test corporate credibility and bandwagon effects in social media ads, while also exploring consumers' cognitive and affective responses to sponsored content. Implications for how companies with varying popularity levels should promote products on social media are discussed.

A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Disclosing Sponsored Content

The amount of literature on the effects of disclosing sponsored content has increased greatly in recent years. Although the literature provides valuable insights into the effects of disclosing sponsored content, several research gaps remain, such as inconclusive findings, boundary conditions, and the mechanisms that explain how disclosures work. This article offers a meta-analysis of 61 papers that use 57 distinct data sets to address these research gaps. The results showed that disclosing sponsored content reduced brand attitudes, credibility, and source evaluation but increased recognition, persuasion knowledge, and resistance. Disclosure content, timing, and awareness, as well as product and sample characteristics, provide boundary conditions for the positive and negative effects of disclosures. A path model that tested the mechanism of disclosing sponsored content showed that, as suggested by memory priming effect, recognition of sponsored content increased memory but did not influence evaluation. Moreover, the understanding of sponsored content influenced evaluation, but memory remained unaffected, which corresponds to the flexible correction approach (i.e., consumers try to correct their answer to limit persuasive effects).

Aging in an Era of Fake News

Misinformation causes serious harm, from sowing doubt in modern medicine to inciting violence. Older adults are especially susceptible—they shared the most fake news during the 2016 U.S. election. The most intuitive explanation for this pattern lays the blame on cognitive deficits. Although older adults forget where they learned information, fluency remains intact, and knowledge accumulated across decades helps them evaluate claims. Thus, cognitive declines cannot fully explain older adults’ engagement with fake news. Late adulthood also involves social changes, including greater trust, difficulty detecting lies, and less emphasis on accuracy when communicating. In addition, older adults are relative newcomers to social media and may struggle to spot sponsored content or manipulated images. In a post-truth world, interventions should account for older adults’ shifting social goals and gaps in their digital literacy.