News for Sale: Audience Deception through Native Advertising

This experimental research is built on the assumption that educated digital natives can be ousted from the list of audience who can be fooled by the persuasive message of native advertising. Previous studies indicate digital natives could recognize native advertising better than the older counterpart. Two hundreds journalism students were involved in the study and divided to six different groups. They were exposed to real native advertising contents from legacy news outlet. The content were designed to look like content from legacy news media and online news media. These students were also exposed to three different themes of native advertising: political content, social content, and brand promotion. It was assumed that, first, educated digital natives have higher ability to spot the paid nature of sponsored content and, second, they  will have different percetion toward the credibility of the content, the brand, and the news outlet based on the theme of the native advertising and the publisher reputation.