Consumers are easily duped by ads masquerading as editorials, according to a new paper by Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Eduard Meleshinsky. Their research shows that these “native ads,” better known as advertorials or clickbait, are becoming harder to differentiate from actual news content. Yet they’re proliferating online at a rapid rate.

Hoofnagle and Meleshinsky surveyed nearly 600 consumers with a typical advertorial embedded in a blog. They found that one in four respondents thought it was written by a reporter or an editor. Although the ad was marked “sponsored content,” it failed to raise a red flag.

Read a longer version of this article on the UC Berkeley School of Law website.

It wasn’t just the layout and font style that tricked readers. The use of color and composition also played a role. For example, the co-authors compared two pullout quotes about a new diet pill along with a photo of a spokeswoman. In one photo, she appeared in front of a white background; in the other, a shelf of blue containers. In front of the blue background, 60 percent of consumers thought she was a medical expert versus 23 percent with a plain white background.

FTC guidelines

Hoofnagle first alerted the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of the survey’s preliminary results in 2013. Last month, the agency issued new guidelines on “deceptively formatted” ads just a week after his paper was published.

The new guidelines are a sign that the FTC is poised to take legal action against deceptive advertorials, Hoofnagle said. “You don’t need a bleeding body to win one of these cases. What you need to show is detriment: a consumer buys a product she ordinarily wouldn’t buy and pays a higher price,” than comparable products.

The old maxim still applies today: buyer beware.