Digital Media Soft Advertising:Shaping Consumer Trends and Transforming Platform Ecosystems

With the rapid development of digital media, the advertising dissemination model has gradually shifted from traditional hard sales promotion to content-integrated soft advertising, which has become the core means for advertisers to promote products and enhance brand value. However, the large-scale dissemination of soft advertising has also triggered new contradictions and risks, and conducting in-depth research on its development logic and impact is necessary. This study takes soft advertising on digital media platforms as the research object, using a combination of literature analysis and questionnaire surveys to systematically explore its causes of emergence, current dissemination status, audience perception, and potential risks. The research results show that the emergence of soft advertising is a strategic choice to address consumers' aversion to traditional hard advertising. The questionnaire survey conducted in this study also reveals a significant contradiction between the "large-scale dissemination" of soft advertising and the "negative audience perception", and further research has found that excessive placement of soft advertising has triggered multiple-dimensional risks. This study clarifies the current development status and core contradictions of digital media soft advertising, which can provide references for regulatory authorities to formulate regulatory policies, platforms to optimize content ecology, and advertisers to regulate dissemination behaviors. At the same time, it fills some gaps in academic research in this field.