This year at SAMIBC2020 we are pleased to announce another of our presenters, Shammi Gandhi from New Mexico State University. Shammi will be presenting, Who Skips and YouTube Ads? – The Moderating Role of Personality Traits and Food Advertising with Emojis: Persuasive Effects of Emotional versus Functional Ads.
Presentation 1 Abstract: Online video advertising is an important platform where a lot of ads get some attention. YouTube is a video-based platform that relies on a large base of online video viewers and has a lot of YouTube video ads broadcasted for such a wide range of viewers. However, often online advertisers encounter the problem with a lot of ads getting avoided or skipped due to the irrelevance, intrusiveness, and irritation caused to the viewers. This paper meticulously investigates this problem to shed more insights into the personalities of these individuals who are more inclined towards skipping and avoiding these YouTube video ads. This paper employs the big five personality traits to understand the YouTube consumers with various personality traits which would aid the advertisers in making prudent decisions about their marketing strategy while keeping in mind the viewers’ ad avoidance behavior and their tendency to skip ads.
Presentation 2 Abstract: Despite the prevalent usage of emojis in food advertisements, no research has examined the role of emojis in food advertising. Additionally, the existing research regarding the effectiveness of emojis provides mixed findings. This is the first research study to use emotion as social information (EASI) theory to examine the contradictory results of emojis’ effectiveness. A 2 (absence/ presence emojis) × 2 (functional/ emotional advertisements) incomplete factorial design was employed with four experimental conditions (i.e., emotional advertisement without emojis, functional advertisement without emojis, emotional advertisement with emojis, and functional advertisement with emojis). In a web-based experiment, a total of 324 participants with 81 participants in each of the four advertisements were recruited from undergraduate marketing classes in a large southwestern U.S. university.
To investigate the relative effectiveness of the four advertising appeals on consumer behavior, multiple ANCOVAs with four experimental conditions (i.e., emotional advertisement without emojis, functional advertisement without emojis, emotional advertisement with emojis and functional advertisement with emojis) were conducted for the five dependent variables: purchase intentions, claim believability, attitude towards advertisement and brand as well as processing fluency of the advertisements with controlling effects of health consciousness and gender. The results, in line with EASI theory, suggested that due to the food advertising context (drink), emotional advertising without emojis led to a higher attitude toward the advertisement, brand attitude, purchase intention, claim believability and processing information than other advertisements (i.e., other experimental conditions). The findings of the current research provide significant theoretical and managerial implications regarding why and when emojis are likely to have unfavorable effects. The results also offer insights regarding the information processing of food advertising.
Despite the increased usage of emojis, with their main role being to transfer emotions in the message (Li, Chan, & Kim, 2018) in marketing communications (Jaeger, Sleegers, Evans, Stel, & van Beest, 2018; Luangrath, Peck, & Barger, 2017; Smith 2015), many fundamental questions arise regarding how different types of advertisements with emojis impact the processing fluency, believability of the advertisements, and consumer attitudes. However, limited research regarding how consumers respond to such approaches exist. To the best of my knowledge, despite seeing various types of advertisements utilizing emojis daily, research is needed to examine how individuals evaluate emotional vs. functional advertisements that include emojis. Therefore, this study aims to examine the effect of emojis across two advertisement types (i.e., perceivably emotional vs. functional).
The goal of this study was also to examine the extent to which the effects of food advertising differ between functional and emotional advertisements with/without emojis. According to EASI theory, the results revealed that, depending on the contextual factor (food advertising) and individuals’ processing of advertising (level of health consciousness and gender), advertising effects are more favorable for all dependent variables when respondents view the emotional advertisements without emojis.
Join us in Nashville, Tennessee to see this great paper and many more March 19 – 21, 2020. For registration information visit www.samnational.org/conference.