"In collaboration with..." The presentation of sponsored posts in lifestyle blogs and consumers' interpretation : The Case of Michaela Forni

Abstract: Background: Due to the rapid growth of social media usage, marketing has significantly moved from traditional ways towards digital marketing. In today’s society, people are exposed to an overload of information through various media channels. Due to the overexposing of marketing, traditional marketing has become less effective since the majority of the information through traditional media channels pass people by. Considering this, companies are seeking new ways to market their brand and products. A new attractive marketing tool is blogs and with the help of bloggers as influencers, companies see the potential of effectively reaching out to their desired target group.   Purpose: The purpose of the thesis is to examine how advertising of brands, products and services are presented in the blog of Michaela Forni as well as the readers’ interpretation of the sponsored content.   Method: This thesis adopted an abductive philosophy, with an interpretive, qualitative methodological approach. The main techniques include content analysis, narrative analysis and semi-structured interviews.   Conclusion: A major finding and conclusion obtained from this study is the importance of what product or service that is promoted in the sponsored blog posts. This factor plays a crucial role whether the readers are susceptible to the sponsored message or not. Thus, sponsored posts are more appreciated than native advertising and ad-banners appearing on the blog as the latter two forms feature content not written by the blogger herself. Michaela Forni is using several presentations styles of her sponsored posts which leads to a bigger interest of the readers due to the variety. One of the most significant conclusion from this study is that branded storytelling is the most effective presentational style of sponsored content. The loyal relationship between the blogger and reader results in less ad skepticism and the reader having a positive association towards the sponsored content on the blog. The authors also identified correlations between the presentation styles of the sponsored content and readers’ interpretations.