Evaluating the effectiveness of native ads in influencing the online user’s association with the brand

Author

Department of Public Relations and Advertising, Faculty of Mass Communication, Cairo University

Abstract

 
This study seeks to evaluate the effectiveness of native ads on social networking sites in influencing the online user’s association with the brand, in the light of testing a set of intermediate variables, which are: the degree of user acceptance of native ads, attitude towards such ads, and awareness of advertised brands. This study also seeks to identify the impact of content value factors (informatics - uniqueness - degree of dependence - personalization - credibility) on each of the attitude towards native ads through social networking sites, awareness of advertised brands, and the degree of user acceptance of those ads. The study relied on the survey approach through a questionnaire which was distributed to an available sample of 400 individual users of social networking sites, as well as the qualitative approach through conducting in-depth interviews with a sample of electronic content makers through social networking sites in a number of commercial companies as well as advertising agencies. The results of the hypothesis tests are significant, the relationship between the content value factors and each of the degree of user acceptance of the native advertising - the attitude towards advertising - awareness of the advertised brand, as it turned out a significant relationship between each of the acceptance of the native advertising- the attitude towards advertising - awareness of the advertised brand and the online user’s association with the brand. The results of the in-depth interviews revealed that the most prominent challenges that could be faced in the preparation of  the native ads were: cognitive challenges related to insufficient information provided by the client to the advertising agency or to the company specialized in designing the electronic advertising content, challenges related to the budget that the client identifies for the advertising campaign , challenges related to the lack of clarity in the advertising policies of social sites, challenges related to the general trend of designing  native ads through social networking sites, as well as challenges related to marketing competition through these sites.

Keywords


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