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To Disguise or To Disclose? Effect of Mimicking News Articles on Sponsored Content Engagement

Media companies are incorporating native advertisements to their websites, placing them as sponsored articles in the news feeds which used to be dedicated to the editorial content. Despite the high similarity in the format, limited studies have investigated whether the ad content should be similar to the news in order to attract consumer attention and increase purchase intent. Using a novel and large-scale dataset from a leading news media company, we investigate whether and to what extent the writing style of the article title affects the user engagement with the sponsored articles. We employ a combination of human evaluation, natural language processing, and binary classification models to extract the linguistic features of sponsored articles. After accounting for endogeneity via a holistic set of econometrics models, we find evidence that mimicking the style of news title could double the click probabilities of sponsored articles. Moreover, it also boosts the conversion probability by over 40%. Sub-analyses show that the impact is moderated by the size of device screen. The effect is especially larger on the mobile devices, indicating that contextual congruity might be a major driving force of the engagement lift. We also compare the linguistic characteristics of adsalike sponsored articles with news-alike sponsored articles. This study shows that many advertisers could improve the content strategy on the news media by matching the news writing style. It also alleviates regulators’ concern on the deceptiveness of native advertising, especially in the form of sponsored articles..