Based on a large real-world dataset comprising Instagram posts of popular influencers, this study empirically analyzes the impact of disclosed and undisclosed advertising on consumers’ engagement with (a) the advertisement and (b) future non-advertising posts of the same author. As extant research reports inconsistent effects of ad disclosures based on inferred motives, persuasion knowledge, and source credibility, this study develops a conceptual framework incorporating these theoretical concepts. To identify undisclosed advertisements, we use data from regions with proper disclosure culture to train a model to predict if posts are advertising. Based on the predictions for > 65,000 posts of 239 macro-influencers, we find that advertising posts gather less engagement than non-advertising posts. Regarding immediate ad engagement, we find that disclosed ads gather less engagement than undisclosed ads. Contrastingly, when analyzing future engagement, we identify positive persistent effects of disclosed advertising and negative persistent effects of undisclosed advertising on consumers’ engagement with future posts of the same author. We conclude that source credibility explains the effect of disclosures on future posts, while the Persuasion Knowledge Model can explain the effect of disclosures on the current advertisement. Thus, consumers’ coping strategies triggered by activated persuasion knowledge are mostly limited to the advertisement. Our findings can explain the opposing results of extant research. From a managerial perspective, we find that by not disclosing advertising posts, influencers and marketers increase an ad’s engagement levels at the expense of persistently lowered attitudes. Conversely, in the long run, they may benefit from transparent disclosures.

本研究基于包含热门影响者 Instagram 帖子的大型现实数据集，实证分析了公开和未公开的广告对消费者参与同一作者的 (a) 广告和 (b) 未来非广告帖子的影响。由于现有研究报告基于推断动机、说服知识和来源可信度的广告披露效果不一致，因此本研究开发了一个包含这些理论概念的概念框架。为了识别未公开的广告，我们使用来自具有适当披露文化的地区的数据来训练模型来预测帖子是否为广告。根据对 239 位宏观影响者的超过 65,000 个帖子的预测，我们发现广告帖子的参与度低于非广告帖子。关于即时广告参与度，我们发现公开广告的参与度低于未公开广告。相比之下，在分析未来的参与度时，我们发现公开广告对消费者对同一作者未来帖子的参与度产生积极的持续影响，而未公开的广告则对消费者产生负面的持续影响。我们的结论是，来源可信度解释了披露对未来帖子的影响，而说服知识模型可以解释披露对当前广告的影响。因此，消费者因说服知识被激活而引发的应对策略大多局限于广告。我们的发现可以解释现有研究的相反结果。从管理角度来看，我们发现，通过不披露广告帖子，影响者和营销人员可以提高广告的参与度，但代价是态度持续降低。相反，从长远来看，他们可能会从透明的披露中受益。