18
Advertising Eﬀects and Advertising
Eﬀectiveness
Louisa Ha
Advertising is a deliberate attempt at persuasion by an identiﬁed sponsor, using controlled messages
displayed in a media outlet not owned by the advertiser (Ha, 2018a). Advertising is one of the many
promotional tools of marketers. Although it is most frequently a paid message by a business (Thorson
& Rodgers, 2012), advertising can also be free, such as public service announcements (e.g., “Don’t text
and drive!”). Advertising tends to be brief and repeatedly delivered with a clear intent to inﬂuence
perceptions of the advertised brand or cause. This persuasive and repetitive nature annoys us and
makes us weary of advertising. At the same time, some ads provide high information or entertainment
value for us. As a result, advertising is both loved and hated. But as Berger (2007) stated, the ﬁrst rule
of advertising is to attract our attention.
Advertising is the primary (or in some cases, the sole) source of funding for many mass
media outlets including television, websites, search engines, online videos, to name a few. In
addition to being a source of funding, advertising itself is an important part of media content.
It deﬁnes the “newshole” for newspapers and serves as “commercial time” or “paid programs”
for television and radio. Diﬀerent advertisements contribute to our perceptions of consumption
and consumerism, as well as the relationships between products, individuals, family, and
friends. But one commonality of all advertising is its goal to appeal to consumers to create the
desired belief or understanding of the brand.
Some people assume advertising has powerful eﬀects, viewing consumers as passive users
being manipulated by advertisers. Others argue that advertising eﬀects are limited because consumers
are active, will act in their own best interests, select messages that they agree with, and
will resist persuasion. There is an irony that advertisers and agencies complain about lowerthan-expected
eﬀects of advertising on sales or other advertising goals; they say consumers are
hard to persuade and that they resist persuasion. In a meta-analysis of advertising eﬀects on
young people’s attitudes, comprehension, and product selection, Desmond and Carveth (2007)
indeed found low explanatory power from advertising exposure. Nevertheless, consumer activists
(e.g., Adbusters, n.d.; Makhijani, 2013) and many scholars (e.g., Berger, 2007; Pollay, 1986)
have expressed concern about the powerful, negative eﬀects of advertising on society. Rotzoll
275
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and Haefner (1996) explained this debate on advertising eﬀects well: “Because of its cultural
boundness, its complexity of forms and functions, and the diﬃculty in ascertaining its outcome,
advertising is highly prone to disparate interpretations” (p. 9). We can begin to resolve this dispute
by understanding the diﬀerence between advertising eﬀects and advertising eﬀectiveness.
Broadly speaking, advertising eﬀects refer to the inﬂuence exerted by advertising on individuals
and society. Such eﬀects can be deliberately caused or unintended by the advertiser. To an individual
brand or advertiser, the sole purpose of advertising is to advance the marketing communication
goals of the brand. These goals can range from creating brand awareness, developing
a favorable attitude toward the brand, building a brand’s identity, to inducing the purchase of the
brand. From the advertiser’s perspective, advertising’s eﬀects on its consumers focus on the beneﬁt
of advertising to the brand as a business. Because the persuasive communication goals are clear
to the advertiser, measuring how much the persuasive goals have been achieved should be
counted as the eﬀectiveness of advertising, not advertising eﬀects. Yet, for the convenience of
emphasizing the inﬂuence of advertising on brand image and sales, most scholars still refer to
such research as advertising eﬀects research. Such microscopic, advertiser-centered perspectives
on advertising eﬀects on a brand’s success are of little concern for social scientists, advertising
critics, and policy-makers who are more interested in the broader societal eﬀects of advertising.
Social Eﬀects of Advertising
The social eﬀects of advertising are collective, cumulative, and mostly unintended by the individual
advertisers. It is likely that few or no advertisers or advertising creators will say their ads are intended
to create a materialistic society. But what their ads portray is a materialistic society that uses products
to meet consumers’ social and psychological needs, such as gaining the respect and admiration of
people who own those advertised products. The blame on advertising for various negative social
eﬀects such as racial and sexual stereotypes, materialistic values, body image and social comparison,
or addiction and consumption of health-hazardous products is not the problem of one advertisement
or one advertiser. Various advertisements with similar themes and appeals, encountered repeatedly,
cultivate those perceptions and values. Because advertisements are short and simple and have to compete
for consumers’ attention with other ads and editorial content, communication strategies that are
easy to comprehend (e.g., stereotypes, eye-catching and attractive images) will be commonly used,
though this reality should not be used to excuse advertisers’ social responsibility.
Advertising and Materialistic Consumer Culture
Since the late 1950s, advertising has frequently been the target of critical scholars for promoting consumer
culture and materialism in society (Nelson, 2008), often criticized through books such as
Vance Packard’s (1957) The Hidden Persuaders, Stuart Ewen’s (1976) Captains of Consciousness:
Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, and Michael Schudson’s (1984) Advertising:
The Uneasy Persuasion. Packard’s work focused on research demonstrating how advertising inﬂuences
consumers through psychological motivation and how children are taught to become “consumer
trainees.” Ewen oﬀered a history of the development of advertising as a tool for American corporations
to exploit human instincts and to mobilize people to become consumers for mass-produced
products. To Schudson, advertising is “capitalistic realism,” which is “part of the establishment and of
a common symbolic culture” shared and celebrated by consumers. Advertising is “thoroughly optimistic,
providing for any troubles that it identiﬁes a solution in a particular product or style of life”
Advertising Eﬀects • 277
(p. 215). He also argued that singularity in the themes and pervasiveness of advertising as a popular
culture has profound impacts on society. Similarly, Richard Pollay (1986) called advertising “a
distorted mirror of the society” with its value “heavy on the seven deadly sins but light on the seven
cardinal values” (p. 20). Most of these and related studies rely on neo-Marxist or political-economic
critiques and perspectives.
Because advertising’s goal is to encourage the use of certain products/brands, it is expected that
consumption of products and advertising exposure are related. Many researchers have used largescale
content analyses to show how advertisements glorify and glamorize consumption using images
and symbols (e.g., Messaris, 1997; Pollay, 1985). The value commonly conveyed in advertising is that
owning products can produce peer recognition, admiration, or social acceptance. This is especially
true for products that have high social functions, such as those related to beauty and fashion.
Research on advertising’s eﬀect on consumer culture assumes all advertisers are motivated by
proﬁt and sell their products and services in advertising to their advantage. Many of these products
may even be hazardous to health such as tobacco, alcohol, fast food, and unhealthy snacks. Indeed,
these are the industries with the largest advertising spending-to-sales ratios (Radio Advertising
Bureau, 2017). The use of advertising bans and regulations on certain products manifests the recognition
of the power of advertising in inﬂuencing consumption of these products. Luxury brands
build their images and status symbols through heavy advertisements. Because non-proﬁt advertisements
are a minority in the advertising world, the eﬀect of advertising on consumption indulgence
and materialism in society is almost a consensus among most scholars researching the social eﬀects
of advertising. However, Holbrook (1987) argued that advertisers have diverse targets and use different
themes to inﬂuence consumers, with some being for wholesome goals such as family values
and helping others. Hence, Holbrook warned against a monolithic approach to interpreting advertising
content. While materialism is considered a negative social eﬀect of advertising, the increase in
consumption can stimulate the economy as a positive economic eﬀect of advertising. Though
beyond the boundaries of this chapter, it is important to note that there is a rich body of literature
on the economic eﬀects of advertising regarding market power and competition (e.g., Albion &
Farris, 1981), product price (e.g., Steiner, 1978), media price (e.g., Ha, 2018a), and product category
consumption (e.g., Saﬀer & Chaloupka, 2000).
Advertising Eﬀects on Children
Researchers have also focused on advertising’s eﬀects on children as a vulnerable population. In
general, children are understood to not yet have the developed cognitive and emotional systems
to identify the persuasive intent of advertising or to resist the inﬂuence of advertising (Laczniak
& Carson 2012). Through a meta-analysis of studies conducted from 1972 to 1994, Martin
(1997) found that the older the child, the more able he or she was to distinguish advertising
from editorial content. Children aged eight or under were less able to diﬀerentiate ads from
editorial content (Stephen, Stutts, & Burdick, 1982). With regard to eﬀects, a 12-month study of
Dutch children aged 8–11 found that advertising exposure increased materialism through
increased desire of the advertised products (Opree, Buijzen, van Reijmersdal, & Valkenburg,
2014). Other studies have shown how advertising aﬀects children through implicitly acquired
aﬀective associations rather than cognitive processing (Nairn & Fine, 2015). Consequently, it is
not just that children lack cognitive ability but also that their aﬀective associations with the
advertised product serve to heighten consumer culture. Together, research ﬁndings on advertising’s
eﬀect on children have important policy implications. For example, some countries such
278 • Louisa Ha
as Sweden have banned advertising to young children, and the United States has restricted
advertising shown in children’s programs.
Advertising Eﬀects on Media Content
The commercialization of media content due to increases in advertising presence is another important
social eﬀect of advertising. Media critics have long lamented how advertising inﬂuences media content
by appealing to the popular taste of the masses in order to maximize viewership. There is
a considerable body of media economics literature examining the eﬀect of advertising on quality of
editorial content. For example, Einstein’s (2004) study of U.S. commercial-broadcast networks’ programs
found that advertising drove program development and reduced the diversity of program content.
Likewise, Picard (2004) found that advertising-supported newspapers placed less emphasis on
content related to social value, and instead featured content that was sensational or that employed
other questionable practices. However, other studies have identiﬁed positive eﬀects of advertising on
editorial and content quality. Sun and Zhu’s (2013) study showed that despite shifting toward popular
topics to attract audiences and advertisers, blogs participating in an ad-revenue-sharing program did
not decrease in quality. Thus, it is possible that advertising as a revenue may actually professionalize
media content, improving quality and popularity by adding funding to the media.
Psychological/Individual Eﬀects of Advertising
Psychological-eﬀects research typically focuses on the intended eﬀects of advertising; so, most
such studies belong to the world of advertising eﬀectiveness. In discussing the individual eﬀects
of advertising, researchers typically diﬀerentiate between cognitive, aﬀective, and conative eﬀects.
Cognitive eﬀects refer to the knowledge and brand accessibility or top-of-mind awareness eﬀect of
advertising on consumers. Aﬀective eﬀects include brand preference, aﬃnity, and attitude toward
the brand. Conative eﬀects are the behavioral eﬀects of advertising on brand purchase, referral,
and advocacy of the brand.
The Hierarchy of Advertising Eﬀects model is the most classical and dominant model in the
study of advertising. Developed by E. St. Elmo Lewis in the late 1800s and advocated by Strong
(1925), the model assumes the process of advertising eﬀects begins with the cognitive eﬀect (A—
awareness/attention) of advertising, which arouses the audience’s interest (I—interest) in the product,
creating a demand (D—desire) for the product, and leads to a purchase decision (A—action).
Given the presumed sequence of eﬀects, the model is more commonly referred to as the AIDA
model and is adhered to by many advertising practitioners. However, diﬀerent views exist regarding
whether the sequence of advertising eﬀects follows this route necessarily. Barry and Howard’s
(1990) review and critique of the research on the Hierarchy of Advertising Eﬀects model and other
alternative sequences of the cognitive, aﬀective, and conative eﬀects shows that, in fact, it is hard to
separate one eﬀect from the other. They argued that it is better to acknowledge the existence of the
diﬀerent cognitive, aﬀective, and conative eﬀects rather than imposing an order of the eﬀects. Nevertheless,
recent studies on advertising still use the AIDA model to examine advertising eﬀectiveness
(e.g., Venkatraman et al., 2015). However, scholars have suggested that the model be expanded to
include responses such as search, like/dislike, share, and love/hate to accommodate the new technology
aﬀordances for consumer searches of information online and post-purchase activities (Wijaya,
2012). With the AIDA model in mind, it might be useful to brieﬂy consider each of the three types
of advertising eﬀects in more detail.
Advertising Eﬀects • 279
Cognitive Eﬀects
Among the three types of individual eﬀects, cognitive eﬀects have received the strongest empirical
support, especially with regard to how repeated exposure to advertising can increase brand accessibility
and top-of-mind awareness (Nan & Faber, 2004) and low-involvement learning of the ad
(Krugman, 1965). There is little dispute that advertising creates awareness of the advertised brand
or the message it promotes. Heightened awareness is especially likely when advertisements are
repeatedly shown to consumers. Additionally, low-involvement learning is common, with people
learning advertising messages without conscious eﬀort but rather through passive, repeated exposure.
When consumers need to make a purchase decision, top-of-mind awareness is crucial; thus,
advertisers need to make their brand the most accessible in memory to the consumer.
Because advertisements are usually not solicited by consumers, people rarely spend much
eﬀort to remember them. Krugman’s (1965) three-exposure theory argues that with a minimum
of three exposures, people will remember ads even when they do not pay much attention to
them. This theory is embraced by advertising practitioners who believe that repeated exposure
to ads will generate the necessary memory for ad eﬀectiveness. It has also resulted in various
propositions concerning the minimum threshold for eﬀective frequency of advertising exposure
(Schmidt & Eisend, 2015). At the same time, brand accessibility also beneﬁts from other promotion
strategies, such as product placement (Ham, Park, & Park, 2017).
Attitude Change Eﬀects
Studies of the eﬀects of advertising on attitude change are more inconclusive. The Elaboration
Likelihood Model suggested by Petty, Cacioppo, and Schumann (1983) oﬀers a comprehensive
explanation for how attitudes are formed and changed through advertising. It posits two routes
to persuasion. Attitudes formed through the central route are more likely to be resistant to
counter-arguments or change because of the elaboration of thoughts through systematic processing
and evaluation of information. In contrast, attitudes formed through the peripheral
route involving cues unrelated to the argument of the message (e.g., jingles, attractive sources)
are less resistant to counter-arguments (Schumann, Kotowski, Ahn & Haugtvedt, 2012).
Research has shown that people with strong attitudes and higher elaboration are more resistant
to persuasive attempts, whereas those who have ambivalent or weak attitudes are more likely to
be persuaded by peripheral cues (Petty & Krosnick, 2014).
Another attitude-change theory is aﬀect transfer, which posits that a positive attitude for
a general object will transfer to a speciﬁc object. In advertising, this means that a positive attitude
toward an advertisement is likely to transfer a positive attitude toward the advertised
brand. In other words, when consumers like the ad, they will tend to like the advertised brand.
However, research on such direct attitude transfers has not provided consistent support. MacKenzie
and Lutz’s (1989) comparison of the aﬀect transfer model with other models found that
there is a dual mediation of attitude toward the speciﬁc ad and attitude toward the brand. The
attitude toward the ad (Aad) aﬀects cognition about the brand as well as attitude toward the
brand (Ab). A subsequent meta-analysis of studies on the eﬀect of Aad on Ab found that cognition
of the brand plays a more important role than attitude toward the ad in inﬂuencing attitude
toward the brand (Brown & Stayman, 1992). However, it must be remembered that the
cognition of the brand can be inﬂuenced by other factors such as prior brand-consumption
experience and familiarity with the brand.
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To appeal to the audience, diﬀerent message strategies are utilized, which can broadly be
categorized into rational (hard-sell) and emotional appeals (soft-sell) by their emphasis (Okazaki,
Mueller, & Taylor, 2010). Rational appeals include information about the product and the
functional beneﬁts to the consumer about the brand. Emotional appeals include various types of
content that arouse the emotion of the consumers such as happiness, humor, fear, anger, love
and erotism (sex), and nostalgia; these are the bases of creative philosophies in many advertising
agencies (West & Ford, 2001). Researchers have found that both rational and emotional appeals
can be eﬀective in generating favorable responses to advertisements, including for example
social media advertising (Lee & Hong, 2016). Many advertising practitioners (Nyilasy & Reid,
2012) and some researchers such as Morris (2012) and Geuens, De Pelsmacker, and Faseur
(2011) argue for the stronger eﬀect of emotional appeals than rational appeals in the persuasive
power of advertising. However, the eﬀectiveness of speciﬁc appeals such as humor, fear, love,
and erotism vary by product and execution. Further, cultural norms regarding the appeals can
also generate a backlash eﬀect.
In terms of speciﬁc types of appeals, research shows that humor generally reduces resistance
toward a persuasive message and increases preference for the ad, but it may also distract a consumer’s
understanding of the ad’s main message. A meta-analysis of the eﬀect of humor as an advertising
appeal showed that humor primarily enhances positive attitudes toward the advertisement, but less
for the advertised brand (Eisend, 2011). In addition, humor is found to be the main factor for eﬀective
television advertising and viral advertising spread by consumers (Porter & Golan, 2006). The use of
humor represents the expectation of advertising to entertain the audiences (Beard, 2008).
Fear appeals are commonly used in health-related advertising by emphasizing the negative consequences
of having health problems or bad habits. However, fear appeals are associated with many
questions. For example, some question the ethicality of arousing fear and posing threats to consumers,
whereas others argue that high fear can result in high eﬀectiveness (LaTour, Snipes, & Bliss, 1996).
The eﬀects of fear appeals also vary by culture. A meta-analysis of more than 60 years of research
found that fear appeals are eﬀective only up to a certain point when consumers feel able to make the
change, but high levels of fear result in incompliance (Ruiter, Kessels, Peters, & Kok, 2014).
Sex appeals are prevalent in the advertisement of products, such as fragrance and clothing,
associated with the attraction of a romantic or sexual partner (Reichert & Lambiase, 2014).
However, the eﬀectiveness of these appeals varies by culture (Liu, 2014). They can attract the
consumer’s attention and recall of the ad, but they can also lower the memory of the advertised
brand by distracting the consumer’s focus from it (Wirtz, Sparks, & Zimbres, 2018).
Finally, nostalgia can arouse consumers’ fond memories of the past, increase involvement in
the ad, and create a liking of the ad as well as the brand (Muehling & Sprott, 2004). More
recent research on nostalgia in advertising focuses on responses to speciﬁc moments (e.g., childhood
brand exposure; Muehling, Sprott, & Sultan, 2014) and the “reminiscence bump” years,
when consumers were 15–24 years old (Ju, Choi, Morris, Liao, & Bluck, 2016).
Conative Eﬀects of Advertising
The most common conative (or behavioral) eﬀect of advertising is purchase of the brand.
Because most eﬀects studies are conducted in a lab setting rather than at the actual point of
purchase, purchase intention or brand selection among choices is often used as a proxy for purchase.
However, interest in consumer engagement, especially on social media, has recently
become another common behavioral outcome measure of advertising eﬀects (Ashley & Tuten,
Advertising Eﬀects • 281
2015). The typical measures of consumer engagements are the clicking of likes, sharing of posts,
and posting comments on social media.
Resistance to Advertising and Advertising Avoidance
In addition to examining the intended psychological eﬀects of advertising, several theories have also
sought to explain how individuals resist persuasive advertising and the intrusiveness of advertising
clutter. Verklin and Kanner (2007) estimate that people (in cities) are exposed to 3,000 ads per day
in various shapes and forms, including outdoor signages, ﬂyers, and commercials. The addition of
social media sponsored posts and other emails implies even more exposure to advertising.
Three major approaches explain users’ avoidance of advertising: reactance theory, the persuasion
knowledge model, and goal impediment theory. Reactance theory argues that audience members
resist attempts at external control and react negatively toward eﬀorts to persuade them (Brehm &
Brehm, 1981). Advertisers violate individuals’ freedom to consume the media content they want to
watch because ads are not solicited by the consumers, with advertisers often forcing consumers to
watch ads via commercial interruption or compulsory online ads (Edwards, Li, & Lee, 2002).
Another theory commonly used is the persuasion knowledge model (PKM) proposed by Friestad
and Wright (1994). Persuasion knowledge is a loose set of beliefs held by the target (the consumer)
about how marketers attempt to inﬂuence his or her decisions, including beliefs that may not be correct
(Yoo, 2009). Consumers learn about the tactics used by advertisers who have a clear intention to
persuade them to buy the product. They then resist persuasive attempts by being critical of the message
and not trusting the advertiser. According to the PKM, the consumer is an active participant,
coping with the persuasive tactics and interacting with the persuasion agent, such as a salesman or an
advertisement (Kirmani & Campbell, 2004). In the context of advertising, consumers will try to
understand the advertiser’s persuasive tactics, and then consider whether the persuasion is eﬀective
and appropriate. Thus, consumers are both goal seekers that utilize the persuasion agent to achieve
their own goals, and sentries that guard against unwanted marketing persuasion.
Several studies of the PKM have found that being repeatedly exposed to persuasive information
causes people to resist persuasive materials (Henrie & Taylor, 2009). For example, one
study showed that diﬀerent ways of delivering product information (e.g., editorials, advertorials,
advertisements) impacted the perceived credibility of the sources of information, perceived selling
intentions, and consumers’ purchase intentions (Attaran, Notarantonio, & Quigley, 2015).
People perceived that the editorial had lower levels of selling intention than the other two information
delivery formats. Editorials and advertorials were perceived as containing more product
information than advertisements, resulting in consumers being more likely to buy a product
based on editorial content and advertorials rather than advertisements.
One ﬁnal theory used to explain the resistance to and avoidance of advertisements is the
goal impediment theory. According to this theory, the interruption of media consumption by
advertising clutter results in consumer resentment. As a result, consumers will choose to skip
or ignore advertisements and continue their media content consumption, even though they may
still be physically exposed to the ads. However, because they do not pay attention to the ads,
advertising will not achieve its intended eﬀect of creating a positive image or memory of the
brand. Further, Ha and McCann’s (2008) integrated model of advertising clutter proposed that
users’ task orientations aﬀect perceived advertising clutter levels. Namely, task-oriented consumers
engaged in informational searches perceive higher levels of ad clutter than entertainment,
exploration, or shopping-oriented consumers. Their propositions were supported by
282 • Louisa Ha
Zanjani, Diamond, and Chan (2011) in an experiment that found that information seekers were
more likely to be aﬀected by ad clutter than were surfers.
Next Steps in Advertising Eﬀects Research
As discussed at the beginning of the chapter, researchers have to determine their path in studying
advertising eﬀects, be it in terms of advertising eﬀectiveness or as a form of cultivation of
social and economic outcomes. Practitioners and applied advertising researchers will likely be
more interested in advertising eﬀectiveness research, whereas academic and critical researchers
will probably be more interested in the broader social consequences of advertising. Regardless,
the recognitions of emerging technologies is central to future scholarship in this area.
Impact of New Media Technologies on Advertising Eﬀectiveness Research
New media technologies enable customization and personalization of communication messages,
making it easier to ﬁnd the target audience for advertisers and allowing consumers to escape exposure
to irrelevant messages. Technologies can also optimize a message through global positioning
system (GPS) locationing and through the avoidance of repetition within a short period of time to
the same audience (Ha, 2018b). How this strategy improves consumers’ receptiveness to advertising
and the overall advertising environment is a fruitful area for researchers. Sundar, Kim, and Gambino
(2017) used their theory of interactive media eﬀects (TIME) to explain how interactive advertising
can be more eﬀective than traditional advertising by increasing consumers’ trust and user
agency, including the avoidance of advertising. They argued that the technological aﬀordances represented
by diﬀerent attributes and features of new media technologies create cues that aﬀect consumers’
perceptions of advertising content and facilitate purchase behaviors or sharing information
with others. The cues and actions can be positive or negative depending on consumers’ use of the
cues as heuristics in judgments and the consumers’ engagement with the advertising content. Below
are a few important future directions that researchers should consider in studying advertising eﬀectiveness
related to new media.
Big Data, Algorithms, and Personalization of Advertising
One major contribution of new media technology in the improvement of advertising eﬀectiveness
is the ability to compile user data through computer network systems. Each company
can generate its own user-data analysis in correspondence with diﬀerent advertising campaign
messages. Advertisers can change their advertising messages easily through the use of programmatic
advertising, which is the use of algorithms to place targeted advertisements in
media content, generate automatic responses, and customize advertising messages to the user.
With a record of consumers’ past behaviors and purchase experiences, the technology can
further increase the eﬀectiveness of communicating to the audience. For example, consumers
who are bargain hunters should be responsive to ads that feature discounts and sales
announcements, and companies can identify this type of consumer through their previous use
of discount codes on their website via their online purchases. On YouTube, for example, the
same ad will not be shown to the same consumer on the same day because of its algorithm.
The extent to which consumers respond more favorably to personalized advertising than
standard mass advertising requires more controlled experiments to see whether the absence
Advertising Eﬀects • 283
or presence of personalization changes their attitude toward the ad and the advertised brand.
Likewise, researchers may also consider studying the challenges that personalization presents.
Namely, as advertising becomes more individualized, diﬀerent consumers will not see the
same ad at the same time. Consequently, such personalization may threaten the power of
advertising to create popular images and symbols, necessitating a comparison between brand
cognitions in mass versus programmatic ads.
Recommender Systems and Machine Learning
Another related personalization technique aﬀorded by computer technologies is the use of machine
learning to recognize the preference pattern of consumers through their past purchases or searches.
E-commerce giants such as Amazon.com and online streaming services such as Netﬂix and YouTube
track the digital footprint of their consumers to discover genre or product category preferences
and to identify complementary products and accessories for the consumer. Recent research
has shown that consumers primarily follow recommendations (Ha, 2018b). Further, advertisements
are presented as recommendations to the consumers based on what they are looking for. Thus, the
nature of advertising as an image builder is changed to a recommended option, based on the consumer’s
need and the automatic generation of advertisements.
Consumer Responses to New Forms of Advertising
New media technologies facilitate the development of new advertising formats such as branded
mobile apps, augmented reality ads, native ads, paid search listings, mobile ads, TrueView skippable
video ads on YouTube, and content marketing. Branded mobile apps keep a brand on the
screen of the mobile device as an app icon. Augmented reality ads can show users what the
various advertised items would look like in their homes before they purchased them. Native ads
are those resembling editorial content, such as promoted tweets and sponsored posts similar to
news feeds on social media. Paid search listings come in diﬀerent forms after a consumer types
a word on a search engine or maps directions, highlighting the advertiser’s paid listing on the
result page. Mobile ads are those that pop up when consumers arrive at a certain location near
the advertiser, or ads that are displayed on the screen when the consumer uses advertisersupported
free apps. Skippable video ads are those that one can choose to skip after ﬁve
seconds. Content marketing is content created by marketers of interest to the consumers in the
form of branded magazines, newsletters, or video channels. Although blurring the boundary
between advertising and editorial content raises the ethical issues of editorial integrity and independence
from commercial inﬂuence, mixing advertising with editorial content may remove the
nuisance of advertising. More studies should be conducted on how receptive consumers are
toward these new ad formats and how eﬀective the formats are for diﬀerent products. It is also
imperative to examine the complementary or substitutional role of these new ad forms in advertising
campaigns versus traditional display ads.
Additionally, it is important that future research recognizes the synergy of pull and push
communication made possible by new media technologies (Ha, 2008). Most advertising is
based on a push model in that advertisers display the ads to the consumers without their
request. But search engine advertising uses a pull strategy based on the initiative of the consumer
using an engine to obtain more information on a product or brand. On the one
hand, the eﬀectiveness of pull strategies should be measured in terms of how useful the
284 • Louisa Ha
information is for the consumers and how accurate the algorithm is in ﬁnding the target
audience which has an interest in and need for the brand. Push strategies, on the other
hand, will encounter resistance and avoidance from consumers unless advertisers create enough
value to the consumers to accept the unexpected and even unwanted advertising messages.
New Measures of Advertising Eﬀectiveness
Traditional advertising-eﬀectiveness measures are mostly about brand awareness, brand preference,
and purchase intentions or sales. But as discussed in the latest development of the AIDA
Hierarchy of Eﬀects model, advertising-eﬀectiveness measures must now include how ads arouse
interest and induce greater searching for information about the advertised brand. Because searching
for product information and reading reviews of products are now easily in reach for most
consumers, measures of searching and immediate online purchases after ad exposure are reasonable
measures of ad eﬀectiveness. In addition, behavioral-eﬀectiveness measures of consumer
behavior should now include additional indicators, such as consumers sharing information with
family or friends. Indeed, consumer advocacy is one of the best indicators of consumer loyalty.
Some alternative measures of advertising eﬀectiveness based on consumer engagement can also
include visits to brand pages and websites, brand channels on YouTube, sharing brand postings,
consumer advocacy for the brand in the form of posting one’s own experiences to friends on
social media, writing product reviews, or creating consumer-generated advertising.
Impact of New Media on Advertising Eﬀects Research
The social eﬀects of advertising will continue to shed light on public policy regarding advertising
and help advertisers to reﬂect on their role in society. Given the advent of diﬀerent media technologies,
the following areas of research will take advertising eﬀects scholarship to the next stage.
Relationships between Advertisers and Consumers: Cat and Mouse or Partners with Mutual
Interest?
Is advertising a zero-sum game only beneﬁtting the advertiser, or can advertising foster
a win–win relationship between advertisers and consumers? Must consumers be the mouse
for the advertiser cat to catch, while consumers try to escape from advertisers through
avoidance or banning advertising all together? Because search advertising has changed the
push model of advertising to a pull model of advertising on demand, research needs to also
consider whether or not these changes improve relationships between advertising and audiences.
Brand channels can provide much useful information about products including product-demonstration
videos and tutorials, as well as product topics of interest to consumers
from other sources. Although such videos are created by the advertisers with vested interests,
its content is often helpful to consumers and can gradually become a standard for all
companies as a service to its customers and to the general public (Ha, 2018b). From this
perspective, advertising can be part of the media content rather than a nuisance. In a new
media environment that customizes ads and makes relevant information easily accessible,
advertisers and consumers can beneﬁt from each other. Advertisers inform and persuade
consumers with relevant and entertaining ads, and consumers can make their choice based
on their needs. How advertisers and consumers perceive their relationship with one another
Advertising Eﬀects • 285
and whether emerging technologies enhance or reduce mutual trust between advertisers and
consumers should be examined further.
Advertising’s Eﬀect on Consumer Expectations
Advertising is about meeting the needs of consumers with promises about how a product will
address their needs. Consequently, it is important to assess how advertising aﬀects consumers’
expectations of the product performance and how often consumers feel the product meets or
exceeds their expectations or disappoints them after actual consumption experiences. Hence,
studying the extent to which advertising aﬀects customer satisfaction and repeat purchase via
setting expectations should be an important direction of research.
Comparing Media Content with and without Advertising Support
Because most new media technologies such as social media and mobile apps oﬀer free content
through advertising, it is imperative to continue to examine the positive and negative eﬀects of
advertising on new media content. A cross-sectional study comparing media content with or
without advertisements can illuminate how advertising aﬀects consumers’ perception of the editorial
quality of media content and media performance (e.g., professional quality, content diversity).
Another approach to ascertain advertising’s eﬀect on editorial quality is through the
longitudinal study of advertising intensity and the editorial quality and content changes in new
media content. This direction may be particularly helpful because many new media platforms
such as social media start with little or no advertising because of their low number of users.
Once they become popular, however, they receive more advertising. How the increase in ad
presence changes the perceived quality in social media such as YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram
is an important advertising eﬀects question.
Longitudinal Studies of Advertising’s Eﬀect on Cultural Values in Society
The social eﬀect of advertising is a long-term eﬀect which requires longitudinal studies to examine
changes and to conﬁrm causal relationships. For example, to establish advertising’s cultivation eﬀect
on consumer culture and the morphing of consumer culture over time, it is necessary to examine
the alignment of consumer values with the values presented in advertising across diverse media outlets.
If the values of consumers and advertising are similar, then at least researchers can conﬁrm
advertising reﬂects consumer values. Causation can be deduced through tracking the changes in
values over time. Further, it is important to borrow from cultivation research in diﬀerentiating
people who are heavy users of advertising versus those who are light users to determine the contribution
of advertising to those cultural values of the consumer. Finally, Pollay (1986) called for the
use of seven cardinal values (wisdom, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, and love) and seven
deadly sins (greed, lust, sloth, pride, envy, gluttony, and anger) as standards for measuring the
values presented in advertising. How to operationalize and measure these values reliably in new
advertising formats will be the challenge to research in advertising eﬀects in the future.
Concluding Thoughts
To conclude, the big data compilation capability and tracking of digital footprints and our
behavior online make websites, emails, messaging apps, search engines, and social media
286 • Louisa Ha
platforms the new Big Brother(s) of our lives. Every webpage a consumer visits is logged and
can be analyzed for patterns for proﬁling. However, not all sites are equal in their knowledge of
consumers. Social media and messaging-app sites know our preferences by what we have
watched and read in the past, who we have connected with on social media, what we have
“liked” and shared, and our frequency of responding to oﬀers. Big Brother is indeed watching
us. But we must remember that the data collected are partial (e.g., we do not use the same
devices and platforms) and behavioral only. Using behavioral data to determine preference, attitudes,
and knowledge is prone to errors, although Google and Facebook are trying to perfect
this induction process. Search engines may make us depend on the ranking of the listing to
determine what is good and bad, and thereby make us lazy by following their recommendations.
More research is necessary to assess this cultural shift of consumers from relying on
themselves to relying on search engines and social media sites which master the compilation of
big data to inﬂuence the decisions of consumers. Because of the unequal distribution of data
and data-management capability among various organizations and advertisers, how big and
small companies may beneﬁt or be disadvantaged in the age of big data is another social eﬀect
to be studied by advertising eﬀects researchers.
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