Participants to the research, most of them highly educated, are accustomed to marketing content on Online Social Media (OSM). They feel confident in distinguishing this content on OSM, especially on familiar platforms. However, unfamiliar platforms seem somewhat more of a challenge. Participants said that they are not accustomed to the layout, the typical content of messages, the tags for sponsoring, etc. Particularly, Tumblr, Google Plus, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter are seen as more difficult to interpret than Facebook or Youtube if one is not used to them (e.g., lots of promo-like or business posts on the former). However, the claimed confidence in identifying marketing content on (familiar) OSM should be treated with care as most of it is based on tasks in which participants needed to provide examples of marketing on OSM themselves. Based on an exercise with examples of marketing practices provided by the moderator, the confidence as stated by the participants needs to be nuanced. In these instances the less obvious marketing examples, socially wrapped ads (=posts or shares by friends or companies/celebs/people followed) or non-obvious competitions or polls (= subject is not a product but a person or news fact), were somewhat difficult to identify, especially for light users. Various elements contribute to the identification of marketing content on OSM: a brand name reference, a link to a website, sponsoring tags, differentiated layout and positioning, commercial language (e.g., %, discounts), to name a few. However, these references are not always clearly present in all marketing content, which sometimes complicates identification. Additionally, the difficulty increases when a third party is posting the message (such as a friend, a blogger, or a newspaper). In participants’ perceptions misleading commercial messages are most often marketing messages that are difficult to identify. Still, some elements that characterize specifically misleading marketing content could be identified. Competitions, third party posts, offers with conditions, offers that are too good to be true and marketing posts for infamous topics such as gambling or weight loss are typically perceived as potentially misleading. However, as participants feel quite confident in identifying marketing content on OSM, they also feel that most content is not misleading. Quite often participants like commercial messages on OSM as generally the topic is related to the theme of the platform or is targeted and thus related to their interests. Finally, in terms of remedies participants expect most actions to come from the OSM platform providers themselves. The most important actions are: unified sponsoring tags, a designated area for all commercial messages and opt-out options. Governmental involvement seems not to be the first priority, although participants admit that a general awareness campaign to inform consumers about the definition and the different forms of commercial messages would be useful. Additionally, more information about the dynamics behind targeted ads would be appreciated and would temper privacy concerns.
