Abstract (eng)
This master’s thesis addresses sponsored content on Instagram blogger profiles. Utilising Friestad's and Wright's Persuasion Knowledge Modell (1994), Brehm's Reactance Theory (1989) and Hovland's and Weiss' Source Credibility Theory (1951) as a theoretical framework, an experiment was conducted to get a better understanding of user’s perception of advertising. A 2 (sponsorship disclosure vs. no disclosure) x 3 (product placement, sweepstake, review) experimental design was conducted online. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate whether posts with and without disclosure have different effects on sponsorship disclosure, persuasion knowledge, brand attitude, buying intention and source credibility. Furthermore, captions underneath the posts were manipulated to ascertain if product placements, sweepstakes and product reviews lead to different impacts on users. The results indicate that a correlation between source credibility and brand attitude exists, regardless of the presence of a sponsorship disclosure. Concerning the advertising types, activation of persuasion knowledge was significantly higher for sweepstakes compared to product placement.