The Swiss voice in the world since 1935
Top stories
Stay in touch with Switzerland

Study reports confusion about ‘journalistically-packaged advertising’

man reading news on a tablet
Reading the news; or reading the ads? Keystone / Martin Ruetschi

Over a third of readers of online articles are unable to distinguish between actual journalism and advertising which is made to look like journalism, a Swiss study has found.

“Depending on the platform in question and how the article was labelled, up to 60% of participants didn’t notice that the article was sponsored,” said Guido Keel from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) in a press release on Wednesday.

Keel and his team ran an online experiment – co-financed by the Federal Office of Communications – involving 1,800 people from German-speaking and French-speaking Switzerland. The goal was to find out how well people could spot such “paid posts”, used more and more for marketing purposes. Recognising such content is important for maintaining the transparency and independence of journalism, ZHAW said.

Researchers found that participants were mostly likely to recognise an article as sponsored if it was marked as such at the end; the form in which the article was written – i.e. whether or not it talked about its subject in a “disproportionately excessive or positive” way – was also something that readers picked up on. However, those who recognised the paid content did not report perceiving it as any less informative or credible than non-sponsored pieces.

As for the wording, half of participants said they didn’t know what the term “native content” meant (here is an overviewExternal link), while 20% weren’t able to properly grasp the terms “paid post”, “sponsored”, or “advertising”.

Popular Stories

Most Discussed

News

Porrentruy swimming pool: the town's mayor was not expecting such controversy

More

Porrentruy mayor comments on Swiss pool ban controversy

This content was published on The mayor of the Swiss town of Porrentruy, which has been in the headlines in neighbouring France after restricting access to a pool to locals after a spate of anti-social behaviour, says he has received much support in recent days.

Read more: Porrentruy mayor comments on Swiss pool ban controversy
Trained on the “Alps” supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano, the new LLM marks a milestone in open-source AI and multilingual excellence, according to its developers.

More

Swiss universities to release multilingual AI programme

This content was published on This summer researchers at Swiss universities will make available a large language model (LLM), an AI programme trained on vast amounts of data, developed on public infrastructure.

Read more: Swiss universities to release multilingual AI programme
Zurich cantonal police introduce fixed online police stations

More

Zurich introduces online police station

This content was published on After a one-year test phase, Zurich's cantonal police are introducing an online police station. Demand is high and the response from the public has been positive.

Read more: Zurich introduces online police station
St. Moritz registers the summer as a brand

More

St Moritz registers ‘summer’ as trademark

This content was published on The chic resort of St Moritz in southeastern Switzerland has registered "summer" as a trademark under the name "St Summer". The resort in canton Graubünden is launching a campaign to strengthen its summer business.

Read more: St Moritz registers ‘summer’ as trademark

In compliance with the JTI standards

More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative

You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!

If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.

SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR

SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR