Cognitive Perception of Native Advertising in the Spanish and Portuguese Digital Press

The digital press has evolved from static or interactive banner advertisements to integrating advertising into news and editorial content. This has stimulated an increase in press income in Spain and Portugal, with a simultaneous and progressive decline in conventional advertising revenues. In-feed native advertisements promoting branded content campaigns have become important drivers of awareness. However, content recommendation advertisements posing as news often produce sensationalist headlines, which rarely correspond to the actual content of the article. This neuromarketing study aims to determine the attention generated and the intensity of emotions produced by both types of content. The study is utilizes eye-tracking techniques and galvanic skin response analysis (GSR) on a sample of 60 subjects to compare the perceptions of young Spanish and Portuguese readers. Additionally, the stimuli used were taken from the digital editions of El País and El Mundo (Spain), as well as Correio da Manhã and Diário de Notícias (Portugal). The results suggest that in-feed native advertising captures greater attention among the youth than content recommendation advertisements, even though the intensity of emotions is more likely related to the content than to the format of content presentation.