The new "Spotlight" format is a teaser that is permanently placed on the top advertising space for 24 hours, making it "a unique offering in the Swiss media landscape", according to a press release from 20 Minuten. The teasers lead to content articles created by the commercial publishing team. The aim is to anchor the customer's advertising message with the audience "in the long term and with a positive connotation".

20 Minuten "Spotlight" has already proven to be very effective: initial implementations achieved over three million impressions in 24 hours and a comparatively high click-through rate of around 4 percent.

"Spotlight enables us to effectively convey our customers' advertising messages through high-quality content and prominent placement. It is the perfect format to promote engagement and strengthen brand loyalty," Florian Sonderegger, Head of Commercial Publishing, is quoted as saying.

"Depending on the platform and the type of labeling, as many as 60 percent of participants did not notice that a post was sponsored content," said media scientist Guido Keel of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences ZHAW, according to a statement Wednesday.

He and his team studied a sample of 1,800 people from German- and French-speaking Switzerland to determine how and whether they recognized so-called native ads while reading them. The study was co-financed by the Federal Office of Communications Bakom.

With native ads, advertisers gain a new way to capture the attention of the audience, especially because the content placed in this way is not heavy-handedly commercial, but journalistic. According to the ZHAW, recognizing such content would be important for the transparency and independence of journalism.

The study participants were most likely to recognize such native ads if a reference was placed at the end of the article. Almost as important for detection is how a topic is reported on, the researchers write, for example if a product is described "disproportionately intensively or positively."

Incomprehensible designations

Surprisingly, the study showed that participants who had perceived a contribution as paid did not necessarily rate the information content and credibility of the content lower than the comparison group from whom the reference to sponsorship was withheld. On the contrary, in individual cases they even rated the sponsored articles as more informative and credible.

The survey also revealed that the specific labeling of sponsored content was often not understood: Half of the participants did not understand what "native content" was supposed to mean, and twenty percent were unable to correctly classify terms such as "paid post," "sponsored" or "advertisement. Between five and ten percent of respondents also assumed that the author had no influence on the content.

The researchers also recorded the eyes of a small sample of the study group while they were reading native ads. The result of this so-called eye tracking with 24 young media users: The reference to the sponsorship was hardly noticed. If it was not part of the running text, it was unconsciously and routinely ignored. And: "Even participants who looked at the sponsorship reference could not remember seeing a reference in the subsequent survey," says Keel. (SDA)