The role of relevancy in native advertising on social media

Native advertising has grown in popularity in recent years, and advertisers continue to look for ways to increase its effectiveness. Beyond the emphases of prior research on ad disclosure and format relevancy of native advertising, the current research contributes to the literature by first testing the relationship between the native ad and social media content by varying the thematic content relevancy of the ad (irrelevant vs. relevant) and second, adding media context effects to the equation by changing the thematic media content consistency (low vs. high) of the surrounding social media posts in the feed. Across three experiments, the ad relevancy effect was significant. The ad relevant to the surrounding content posts decreased ad intrusiveness and increased positive ad or brand attitude compared to an irrelevant ad in high media content consistency settings. In low media content consistency settings, the ad’s relevancy did not matter as much. Moderated mediation found that higher ad intrusiveness drove lower ad attitude and brand attitude for the irrelevant ad only in the high content consistency condition. This relationship did not occur for the low content consistency condition. The findings highlight the importance of testing thematic ad-content relevancy in digital media settings that present novel content presentation formats. Theoretical implications are provided regarding the psychological appeal of relevancy and the different media contexts where schema theory can be more or less applicable. Practical implications on how to place ‘in-feed’ native ads and how social media platforms may facilitate contextual ad targeting, given the different media content consistency backdrop, are discussed.