Prelims

Half Title Page

Advertising in New Formats and Media

Current Research and Implications for Marketers

Title Page

Advertising in New Formats and Media

Current Research and Implications for Marketers

Edited by

Patrick De Pelsmacker

University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2016

Copyright © 2016 Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78560-313-6 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78560-312-9 (Online)

List of Contributors

Introduction

Consumers today have growing access and are increasingly exposed to different media. Besides traditional media, we live in an environment that is surrounded by digital devices such as mobile phones, laptops, and tablets. New communication technologies such as live stream Internet, computer games, social media and social network sites, online brand communities, and blogs have given advertisers new platforms to communicate and promote their messages. In addition to this, the media themselves are converging. Mobile phones are not simply used to make phone calls or to send text messages, but also to play games, listen to music, go online, take photographs, make and watch video clips, and chat with friends. The same trend is seen on the Internet. When people watch television, they increasingly do it online, using media such as computer, tablet, smartphone, etc. Another phenomenon is that people are increasingly using the different media they have access to simultaneously. We increasingly use two or three different media at the same time, or jump very quickly between them, as, for instance, watching television while paying a game on the laptop and texting a friend. Advertising fatigue increasingly leads to advertising avoidance, and technological developments make it increasingly easy to avoid ads. For instance, commercial blocks can be easily skipped on digital television, and many people have installed ad-blocking software on their laptops.

Marketers respond to these phenomena and use the opportunities of technological developments to target customers in new and different ways, both in traditional and in new media. Two remarkable phenomena are apparent, namely interactivity in online communication, and integration of editorial and commercial content, or the combination of both.

Advertising is no longer one-way communication. Traditional marketing delivered a commercial message on traditional media like television, radio, and print. Nowadays, commercial messages are delivered on multiple offline and online media simultaneously to take advantage of the specific characteristics of the different communication channels. An example of this are advertisers who try to link the traditional 30″-spot on television with online media by placing funny advertising spots on social network sites (SNS) or video sites (such as Youtube) and by invoking viewers to surf to the accompanying branded website to achieve a viral effect of the campaign. Interactivity plays an important role in these campaigns. Interactivity relates to all the media activities and advertising that is happening in the online world. The term ‘interactivity’ is therefore often associated with the Internet, and has three characteristics, namely user control, direction of communication, and time. User control refers to the ability of the user to search for information and control the amount of information. The direction of online communication is often two-way because the Internet creates possibilities to communicate and interact with other people. Time refers to synchronization. Interactivity can happen simultaneously (e.g., if a person chats with another person) or the interactive content can be delayed (sending an e-mail). Interactive media are further characterized by six features: ubiquitous connectivity, personalization, peer-to-peer networking, engagement, immersion, and content creation. Marketers design advertising campaigns that use the constant connectivity and interactivity of people, their multitasking, and the fluency of their media usage. Moreover, the interactive media experiences of people are becoming more and more personalized. Immersion in interactive media can be found in interactive games and virtual worlds. Some interactive media also create the opportunity to network between peers. Nowadays, consumers are not only a passive audience. New media formats create possibilities for them to engage in a more active manner than ever before. As a result, consumers themselves are creating and sharing content online. Advertisers make use of this content creation and stimulate young people to promote their products and brands within their personal network. Doing this, advertisers can obtain further information from the consumers and disseminate the behavior of the consumers or brand ambassadors.

Next to the trend of marketing communication campaigns that make use of the interactive online world, advertisers have developed new, more subtle, and integrated promotional techniques. One of the characteristics of the new commercialized media environment is the integration of the persuasive message in its context. This is the case with branded entertainment or content marketing and native advertising. Branded entertainment or content marketing is the integration of brand identifiers in media context, such as brand identifiers placed in movies, television programs, music, games, and websites. Native advertising is the term used for content marketing on the internet. The commercial content is integrated into the context of a website or on social media site and the experience of a given platform. Examples are profile targeting, online behavioral advertising, in-game advertising, and advergames.

Three types of integration between a persuasive message and its context can be distinguished: format, thematic, and narrative integration. Format integration is the integration between the message format and the editorial context. An example of this type of integration is an advertorial in a magazine or native advertising on websites that resembles an editorial article or website content. The conceptual congruence between the persuasive message and its context is referred to as thematic integration. When a sports brand logo is placed in a football game, the ads are placed around thematically congruent content. Advergames or television programs which are based on brands are examples of narrative integration, in which the persuasive message is integrated within the narrative of the media context.

The assumption behind content marketing is that advertising is most effective when the consumer does not recognize it as advertising. Moreover, the commercial message itself cannot be skipped by the viewer, the reader, or the surfer on the Internet without losing program content, and native advertising cannot be effectively recognized by ad-blocking software. As a result, the lines between advertising and entertainment and content have become increasingly blurred. For the consumer, this level of integration makes it harder to identify the commercial content as a form of advertising, to understand the commercial intent of the program, and to avoid these commercial messages if he or she wants to.

These new advertising practices and formats also pose ethical challenges. Many interactive forms of commercial communication collect personal and behavioral data from media users to be used in later campaigns, often without their knowledge or consent. Integrated advertising forms are often not recognized as such by media users; they often do not understand their persuasive intent and, in any case, cannot avoid them. Apart from the fact that this potentially compromises customer sovereignty, it also raises the question on whether and how these practices should be disclosed and explicitly be labeled as “advertising.”

The advertising universe is changing rapidly, and academic research is increasingly focusing upon these new techniques and formats, how they work, and how consumers are affected by or respond to them. This book makes an important contribution to the field of advertising because it brings together state-of-the-art recent insights into new advertising formats and how they work. Seventeen chapters provide conceptual overviews, discuss recent academic literature, report research work, or develop viewpoints on the issues discussed above. They provide a valuable overview of insights into modern advertising practice for both advertising academics and practitioners.

The book contains three parts. The first part is called “The Changing Advertising Universe.” It features six chapters that each give an overview of key evolutions’ challenges regarding new advertising formats. In the first chapter, Rosengren builds on a review of the literature on advertising attention, avoidance, and approach to develop a conceptual framework to better understand advertising attention in new formats. New advertising formats might force advertising practitioners and researchers to reframe the challenges of gaining attention as one of understanding advertising approach rather than advertising avoidance. She offers an extensive agenda for future research directions. In the second chapter, Eelen and colleagues provide an overview of the state of knowledge about creative media advertising, by reviewing all the empirical findings about creative media advertising effects, that is, advertising that uses media that implicitly communicate the message. They address the mechanisms that explain how creative media affect consumers. Arrazola and colleagues look at the development, types, and effectiveness of new forms of advertising on television and report on the current state of research in the field. In the fourth chapter, Segijn presents a typology for a new form of media multitasking, multiscreening, and provides an overview of current knowledge in the field on the basis of a review of recent literature in the field of multiscreening, media multitasking, persuasion, and advertising effectiveness. Consumers increasingly use multiple media and advertising taps into that phenomenon by placing their campaigns in different offline and online media, counting upon a synergistic effect of this multiple media use. In the next chapter, Huang and Li examine the evolvement of media synergy research in the past years by providing an extensive overview of recent studies from a wide range of leading academic journals. In the final chapter of this first part of the book, Boerman and van Reijmersdal tackle the topic of disclosure of hidden commercial messages in editorial content. This chapter provides an overview of what is currently known in the academic literature about the effects of disclosures of sponsored content on consumers’ responses by means of a review of 21 empirical studies.

The second part of the book is called “Advertising in a Digital Connected World” and contains five chapters that focus upon new online commercial communication formats. Electronic word-of-mouth marketing (e-WOMM) is the term that describes advertising campaigns that make use of the fact that consumers share and comment upon online content. They try to engage consumers in spreading the word about their products or brands. Although more and more studies are analyzing word-of-mouth marketing, the topic is still very recent, and little is known about how to develop an effective e-WOMM campaign. In the first chapter, López and colleagues present a literature review on e-WOMM in social media for a better understanding on how to manage such campaigns and identify the main decisions that should be taken when planning them. Brand pages, as a form of virtual brand communities, are a popular tool for companies to communicate with consumers in social network sites. In the second chapter, Sicilia and colleagues review the literature on brand pages attending to the main differences with other virtual communities, the motivations to join brand pages, and its consequences for consumers and brands. The next chapter deals with consumers’ online brand endorsements. By means of a literature review, Bernritter and colleagues introduce the concept of consumers’ online brand endorsements, provide an overview of the drivers and consequences of this phenomenon, and answer the question whether and when the broadly adopted marketing strategy of activating consumers to endorse brands online is feasible. One of the fastest growing areas in marketing communications is mobile advertising. By means of two surveys, Royo-Vela and Meyer explore and measure acceptance, wear-out, irritation, and attitudes toward this advertising technique. In the last chapter of this part, Horváth and Mitev report the results of a qualitative study into Internet memes, a distortion of an original idea that is shared online. They develop a typology of memes and discuss the relevance of this phenomenon for brand equity.

The third part of the book is named “Hidden but Paid for: Branded Content.” Six chapters discuss offline and online branded content, how advertisers may use it, and how consumers respond to it. In the first chapter, Charry and Tessitore take a deeper look into understanding brand placement by defining it, examining its use, and discussing its consequences, both from a marketing and a consumer welfare perspective. It also tries to reconcile these sometimes contradictory perspectives to achieve a common ground and a positive outcome for all stakeholders. In the next chapter, Verhellen and colleagues report the results of a field study on a panel of television viewers that were surveyed one week after the final episode of an advertiser-funded fashion program. The study aims to explain how program liking, program connectedness, and product category involvement influence brand attitudes as a result of advertiser-funded programming. Brand placement is used in many different media. The next two chapters deal with placements in games. Digital gaming has become one of the largest entertainment sectors worldwide, increasingly turning the medium into an attractive vehicle for the communication of advertising messages. Herrewijn and Poels report the results of three experiments in which the effects of the social setting in which a game is played, the game controls that are used, and the influence of the game story are studied. Chen and colleagues examine the consumer meanings of brand placements embedded in social games in different cultural contexts, by means of essay assignment and in-depth interviews. Brand placement is also increasingly integrated in music videos. Hudders and colleagues report the result of an experimental study in which the impact of both brand placement characteristics (i.e., brand prominence, valence of artist–brand relationship) and audience characteristics (i.e., artist connectedness) is explored. Brand placement also raises ethical concerns, especially when they are targeted at vulnerable groups, such as children. In the last chapter, Hang and Nairn highlight the latest research on the implicit influence of online game advertising on children, and discuss some possible solutions to help them cope with this implicit influence.

Patrick De Pelsmacker

Editor