Perceptions of brand quality, and the effect of adjacent advertising.
“The researchers’ findings about the relationship between ads and perceptions of quality were equally intriguing. Conventional wisdom is that advertising is a mild annoyance for readers (some websites offer ad-free versions as a perk for paying subscribers). To investigate this, the researchers placed two types of ads alongside the article about Greece, ones they describe as “cheap” and “good.”
The biggest surprise was that “good” ads had almost as powerful an impact on perception of quality as an editorial brand. When the article was viewed beside ads for Jaguar and Credit Suisse, but without a brand, readers rated it a 6, nearly high as the 6.1 it received as an ad-free Huffington Post piece. Even the “cheap” ads (for online card games and astrology) earned a slightly higher rating of 5.6 for the no-brand story.
But if the article appeared under an editorial brand, readers saw advertising as a negative. The impact was greatest for the most lustrous masthead. The “cheap” ads reduced the perceived quality of the Economist story to 6.2, nearly the ranking it earned as a Huffington Post story with no advertising. Even the “good” ads made readers a little more critical.
This finding may not be quite so uplifting for legacy media companies. It is bad enough that even classy ads slightly depress the value that readers see in their content. More worrying, if you are a publisher, is the apparent power of “good” consumer brands to confer a quality halo on editorial content.
The obvious conclusion to draw is that owners of “good” brands may be able to cut out the publisher altogether and produce their own content. Sure enough, that is one of the emerging trends on the Internet. Retail sites such as Groupon, Gilt Groupe and Net-a-Porter publish their own editorial material. One reason it works is that it is good; Groupon’s writing is smarter and sharper than that of many pure publishers. But the Harvard researchers’ findings suggest we may also like the stories on these sites partly because of the borrowed lustre of the branded goods sold on them.”
CPPS 