Native Advertising in a Mobile Era: Effects of Ability and Motivation on Recognition in Digital News Contexts

Digital news is progressively blurring with commercial content at the same time that mobile technology is increasingly being used to access news. To understand if these trends affect ability to distinguish news from covert advertising, two experiments were conducted among U.S. adults examining whether viewing content on a mobile device versus computer interacts with motivation levels in affecting recognition of native advertising. Consistent with tenets of the Covert Advertising Recognition and Effects model, results show that although people with greater motivation to process media content were more likely to recognize native advertising, it was not enough to compensate for the greater cognitive effort required when using a mobile device.