Native Advertising and Content Marketing: Persuasion Knowledge Impact on Attitude Towards Advertising and Brand

The development of digital technology has increased the speed and volume of data consumed by humans on a daily basis. Due to the constant digital noise, people ignore a significant part of the information that they consider unnecessary, for example, advertising. Therefore, gradually standard advertising formats, such as banners, became ineffective. They have been replaced by content advertising - advertising technologies that are based on interesting and relevant content. Such advertising overcomes the "banner blindness" of network users, because its content is relevant to the interests of the audience, and the appearance mimics the format of non-commercial content. This study explores and compares the types of content advertising: native advertising and content marketing. The comparison is based on the persuasion knowledge model. The research problem is caused by the inconsistency or insufficiency of existing studies of the dependencies between the components of the persuasion knowledge model: persuasion knowledge itself, evaluation of advertising and attitude to the brand in contact with native advertising and content marketing. To solve the problem, an online experiment was conducted: respondents read native advertising, content marketing material or an article without advertising, and then answered the questionnaire. The experiment showed that a high level of persuasion knowledge activates the mechanisms of resistance to persuasion, which leads to an increase in mistrust and a more negative attitude towards the information in the article. This negatively affects the attitude towards the brand if the article is advertising. Comparing the types of content advertising using persuasion knowledge model, it was found that content marketing causes a more positive attitude to the brand than native advertising. Thus, content marketing is the preferred marketing technology for brands whose goal is to build a positive brand attitude for their target audience.