Advertisers have turned attention to the popular photograph-based social network Instagram. One technique for reaching consumers has been advertisements resembling posts one’s friends might make. These native advertisements use Instagram’s conventions and may be unrecognized as sponsored messages at first glance, when browsing one’s Instagram. A within-subjects experiment (N = 482) tested these native ads against both user-generated posts and traditional advertisements. These message types were presented in a repeated-measures design, rotated across three well-known brands, and interspersed with distractor posts. Results indicated that the three message types produced similar effects on ad attitude, brand attitude, and behavioral intention. However, user-generated social posts produced more credibility and social comparison than native ads, and native ads produced more credibility and social comparison than advertisements. This yielded indirect effects on dependent variables of interest, despite the lack of total effects. Sponsorship recognition was relatively high for native ads but did not mediate effects.

中文翻译：

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那是我的朋友还是广告？Instagram本地广告作为社交帖子的有效性

广告商已将注意力转向流行的基于照片的社交网络Instagram。一种吸引消费者的技术是类似于朋友可能发布的帖子的广告。这些本地广告使用Instagram的约定，并且在浏览自己的Instagram时乍一看可能不会被视为赞助信息。受试者内部实验（N = 482）针对用户生成的帖子和传统广告测试了这些原生广告。这些消息类型以重复测量的设计形式呈现，在三个知名品牌之间轮换显示，并散布着分散注意力的帖子。结果表明，这三种消息类型对广告态度，品牌态度和行为意图产生了相似的影响。但是，用户生成的社交帖子比本地广告产生了更多的信誉和社交比较，原生广告比广告产生了更多的信誉和社会比较。尽管缺乏总体影响，但对感兴趣的因变量产生了间接影响。原生广告对赞助商的认可度相对较高，但并未起到中介作用。