Understanding which cues people use to identify influencer marketing on Instagram: an eye tracking study and experiment

Abstract

While influencer marketing is gaining importance as a social media advertising strategy and guidelines require influencers to disclose the practice, it is still unclear whether Instagram users recognize and understand this type of advertising. This study aims to gain insights into the level of persuasion knowledge of influencer marketing on Instagram, and which cues Instagram users use to identify influencer marketing. An eye tracking study (N = 67) and an online experiment (N = 371) reveal that (1) Instagram users seem to be aware of influencer marketing but also make mistakes in identifying it within their Instagram feed, (2) users pay most attention to brand tags in pictures and 'Paid partnership' labels and least attention to #ad, and (3) disclosures, brand presence, and influencer type all influence the level of conceptual persuasion knowledge. Although previous research has shown that disclosures can be important drivers of persuasion knowledge activation, this study is the first to reveal that bottom-up factors such as brand presence and the type of influencer can also have this effect. Importantly, our findings signal that the lines between non-commercial and commercial content on Instagram are still blurred.

A Critical Genre Analysis of Covert Advertising Through Short-Videos in Douyin: The Chinese Version of Tik-Tok

“…In other words, besides using sponsorship disclosure as a top-down pathway, characteristics of the message and peripheral features can also be used as bottom-up cues to identify covert advertising. Boerman and Mu¨ller (2022) proved that the level of persuasive knowledge activation in covert short-video adverting recognition was affected by a bottom-up factor-''brand tags in pictures.'' Previous studies in the context of covert advertising recognition mostly investigated top-down pathway such as disclosure transparency (e.g., Boerman et al, 2017), whereas limited studies focused on bottom-up cues such as message characteristics and peripheral features .…”

# Sponsored-influencer marketing: effects of the commercial orientation of influencer-created content on followers’ willingness to search for information

“…Moreover, current literature suggests that trustworthiness towards the celebrity is linked to a more positive attitude towards the message shared (Wang and Scheinbaum, 2018). As influencers are considered similar to ordinary people (Cocker et al , 2021; Lou and Yuan, 2019), followers feel they are more relatable than conventional celebrity figures (Boerman and Müller, 2022), thus believing they share their honest opinions about brands and make recommendations. Accordingly, this study defines trustworthiness towards the influencer as the extent to how honest, reliable and dependable the influencer is perceived.…”

“…Influencer marketing via Instagram has become a primary vehicle for branded content (Haenlein et al , 2020; Sashittal and Jassawalla, 2020) and is selected as the research context of this study. Although Instagram has emerged as the most popular outlet for promoting brand-related posts by sponsoring social media influencers (Jin and Ryu, 2020; Pozharliev et al , 2022), such sponsorships give a commercial orientation to Instagram posts and cast doubts in the customers’ minds concerning the trustworthiness of influencers’ opinions (Boerman and Müller, 2022). Except for Jin et al (2019) and Martínez-López et al (2020), there exists a paucity of research examining the effects of sponsorship disclosure on trustworthiness towards the influencer within the context of visual-based social media platforms.…”

Eye-Tracking Dataset to Support the Research on Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Eye trackers are currently utilised in a plethora of applications. To name a few, applications of marketing (Boerman, and Müller, 2022), psychology (Åsberg Johnels et al, 2022), product design (Jeon, Cho, and Oh, 2021), and many others.…”