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This article reviews the quantitative marketing literature on artificial intelligence (AI) through an economics lens. We apply the framework in Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence to systematically categorize 96 research papers on AI in marketing academia into five levels of impact, which are prediction, decision, tool, strategy, and society. For each paper, we further identify each individual component of a task, the research question, the AI model used, and the broad decision type. Overall, we find there are fewer marketing papers focusing on strategy and society, and accordingly, we discuss future research opportunities in those areas.

The digital environment afforded by social networks has created an opportunity to understand more clearly the impact of social media native advertising on advertising processing outcomes. Thus, the current study integrates native advertising with engagement literature to compare engagement outcomes between feed and banner placements before analyzing engagement outcomes of sponsored social media posts by advertising objective. This work aims to contribute to advertising effectiveness literature arguing for the importance of engagement as a measure of effectiveness.

Facebook advertising data were collected from a convenience sample of 10 Facebook advertisers that accounted for roughly $414,000 in advertising spend. Panel data, which are also called longitudinal or cross-sectional time-series data, used 26 months of data from the 10 advertisers to measure relationships between native advertising exposure and digital consumer engagement with advertising by advertising objectives of brand awareness, link clicks, conversions, post-engagement and video views.

Exposure to native advertising was a strong predictor of advertising processing and consumption using the three variables of interest: clicks, comments and shares. Ads reaching consumers while natively consuming content in their feed resulted in statistically significant improvements in impressions and clicks when compared to banner ads. Exposure to native ads was significantly related to all engagement outcomes of interest, except for advertisers who chose post-engagement as their advertising objective.

The results suggest that for advertisers seeking clicks, post-engagement objectives should likely be avoided. For this group, impressions were not related to link clicks but were related to comments and shares. Native advertising placements in the feed, however, are generally more effective than banner ads on Facebook for advertisers seeking engagement.

This research is one of few studies to use longitudinal advertising data to explore engagement effects using real-world data collected from a diverse set of Facebook advertisers over a 26-month period. This study shows that interactive marketers using a social media feed to reach consumers can expect positive outcomes in advertising consumption, affective and cognitive processing and advocacy, but those outcomes may vary by advertising objective.

Given the uniqueness of the data set, the findings contribute to native advertising literature and to the literature on digital consumer engagement with advertising in social media. The study also provides empirical support for the efficacy of native advertising.

This paper aims to investigate the role of five highly relevant advertiser- (i.e. personalization and ad placement) and consumer-controlled (i.e. privacy concerns, perceived relevance and Facebook motives) factors in the evaluation and perceived outcomes of personalized Facebook advertising as well as how these factors interrelate.

Twenty-eight semi-structured interviews, in which elicitation techniques were used, were carried out among 25- to 55-year-old Facebook users.

The findings point to a complex tradeoff between the risks and benefits of personalized Facebook advertising, in which perceived relevance and Facebook use motives play a vital role.

This study focused on the general Facebook advertising experience, yet the elicitation techniques were applied only on the desktop website. Future research should look further into mobile advertising formats.

Personalization and retargeting algorithms could be improved and ads should be designed with the customers’ interests in mind to improve their effectiveness and reduce privacy concerns.

Social media advertising innovates at a high pace. Yet, the literature shows an urgent need for research into which ad formats and characteristics appeal to users and why (or why not). Qualitative studies into the determinants of advertising outcomes are scarce but highly needed because they can uncover complex interactions between factors and thus provide a deeper understanding.

Advergames, or integrated brand messages within digital games, have received considerable attention from researchers and practitioners. Despite increased use of advergames as a brand promotion strategy by a range of well-known brands, limited understanding exists about a number of issues related to the effective use of such games. This paper aims to critically review the literature on advergames by performing a detailed analysis of existing research in this area and propose an organizing framework. Based on this framework, the authors discuss key issues with current understanding and propose important questions for future research.

This literature review follows Webster and Watson’s (2002) concept-driven systematic review methodology elaborating on the key antecedents and consequences identified in advergame studies (what we know: current knowledge), followed by the discussion of key factors that should be investigated as antecedents and consequences (literature gaps).

This paper presents a review and synthesis of advergame studies based on Terlutter and Capella’s (2013) integrated marketing communication framework. It identifies game, individual and social factors and suggests how these factors could affect a consumer’s brand-related cognitive, attitudinal and behavioral responses. The authors further propose an advergame framework that identifies two different “unit of analysis” (antecedents and consequences of game factors and antecedents and consequences of individual and social factors), which can be used by scholars to center their research efforts in a more detailed fashion.

Research questions posed in this literature review indicate that future research in the area of advergames should focus on investigating the effects of various game, individual and social factors on consumers’ cognitive, affective and behavioral responses.

The advergame framework provided here provides firms with a guide to the factors that may affect their consumers’ cognitive, affective and behavioral responses and helps them in developing effective advergames.

The paper provides a comprehensive review of the advergame literature that has not been done before and develops a general advergame framework that can be applied in all contexts and will guide future studies in the area. Overall, the study helps the researchers to identify critical issues and concepts related to advergames and shapes future research in the field.

The purpose of this paper is to model group advertising decisions, which are the collective decisions of every single advertiser within the set of advertisers who are competing in the same auction or vertical industry, and examine resulting market outcomes, via a proposed simulation framework named Experimental Platform for Search Engine Advertising (EXP-SEA) supporting experimental studies of collective behaviors in the context of search engine advertising.

The authors implement the EXP-SEA to validate the proposed simulation framework, also conduct three experimental studies on the aggregate impact of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), the competition level and strategic bidding behaviors. EXP-SEA supports heterogeneous participants, various auction mechanisms and also ranking and pricing algorithms.

Findings from the three experiments show that both the market profit and advertising indexes such as number of impressions and number of clicks are larger when the eWOM effect is present, meaning social media certainly has some effect on search engine advertising outcomes, the competition level has a monotonic increasing effect on the market performance, thus search engines have an incentive to encourage both the eWOM among search users and competition among advertisers, and given the market-level effect of the percentage of advertisers employing a dynamic greedy bidding strategy, there is a cut-off point for strategic bidding behaviors.

This is one of the first research works to explore collective group decisions and resulting phenomena in the complex context of search engine advertising via developing and validating a simulation framework that supports assessments of various advertising strategies and estimations of the impact of mechanisms on the search market.

This paper aims to explore people’s beliefs towards Islamic advertising.

Being exploratory in nature, this paper applies qualitative method of research by adapting thought elicitation technique of data collection. This method rests in the projective techniques of data collection and is also known as “word association technique”. It allows free thinking of respondents that helps in generating rich data which is most required in qualitative studies.

Various beliefs regarding Islamic advertising were extracted and categorized into different dimensions. These dimensions pertained to Islamic advertising’s possibility, nature, characteristics, real-time decisions and potential outcomes.

Being an exploratory study, the data are collected from a small sample, hence raising generalization issues. Though, the same opens avenue for future research in that these dimensions should be subject to validation via large sample size.

This research will help in developing a scale to measure attitudes towards Islamic advertising, which the researchers can use to find justification for using Islamic advertising. Such application has great implications for businesses, as Islamic advertising concept stands contrary to the contemporary practices.

With a growing concern for business ethics, this research is an attempt to bring Islamic ethics into advertising practice. This will not only eradicate the ill-effects of contemporary advertising but also provide sound evidence for revising advertising policies.

It adds to the developing field of Islamic marketing, by being the first attempt of its kind in paving the way for Islamic advertising.

This study explores the effect of gender stereotyping and issue advocacy on consumer sentiment toward advertising and brands.

Drawing from the literature, the study hypothesizes about the impact of gender stereotyping and consumer advocacy on consumer sentiment. A behavioral experiment tests the hypotheses and provides support for the main conclusions.

Results indicate that issue advocacy can cancel the negative effect of traditional female stereotyping. The results also show that demographics are not necessarily the reason why a person favors or condemns stereotyping and advertising; on the contrary, any reaction is far more linked to personal disposition.

The findings of this research have implications for marketing and advertising practice. While the use of issue advocacy is currently trending up, there is still a lack of understanding about its effect on consumers. Gender stereotyping is also being frequently used, but has caused huge backlashes in recent ad campaigns. Marketing and advertising managers can use insights from this research to shape advertising messages that use these two stimuli in order to enable a brand to better connect with its audience and achieve a more desirable outcome.

The paper contributes to the academic discussion about the effectiveness of using gender stereotyping and issue advocacy to drive advertising outcomes. It challenges the idea that the combination of these two advertising approaches is either detrimental or beneficial to the brand.

In-feed native ads have become a major social media advertising format. The purpose of this paper is to investigate strategies for leveraging native advertising in terms of content creation and platform selection on social media, proposing that variations in content and platform reduce the intrusiveness of native ads, thereby resulting in enhanced brand attitude and purchase intent.

Two experiments were conducted with online samples, employing a 2 (content strategy: repeated ads vs varied ads) × 2 (platform strategy: single platform vs multiple platforms) between-subject factorial design. ANCOVA and structural equation modeling were used to test the hypotheses.

When repeated ads were used, the use of multiple platforms reduced ad intrusiveness, resulting in more favorable brand attitude and greater purchase intent as opposed to the use of a single platform. In contrast, when varied ads were used, there were no significant differences in the outcome variables between a single platform and multiple platforms. The results were largely consistent across the two experiments.

This study contributes to theory advancement by unpacking the underlying mechanisms of processing native advertising and shedding light on which content and platform strategies are the most effective on social media.

This paper aims to investigate the extent to which nostalgic advertising can foster brand love. It examines the effects of two common forms of nostalgia in advertising – that is, personal and historical nostalgia – on consumers’ love towards a brand in both a developed (the UK) and a developing country (India).

A pre-test and post-test quasi-experimental study was conducted with two representative samples of consumers (i.e. 277 British and 255 Indian). Respondents were randomly exposed to one ad evoking either personal or historical nostalgia, or a non-nostalgic ad.

The results indicate that the use of nostalgia in advertising increases brand love in both countries. However, the effectiveness of each type of nostalgia varies depending on the country considered. In the UK, personal nostalgia increases brand love more than historical nostalgia, whereas, in India, historical nostalgia was found to be more significantly related to brand love than personal nostalgia.

The primary implication for marketers is to consider nostalgic advertising as a critical lever to building longer-term value for a brand (i.e. brand love) whilst being mindful of the country-specific differences regarding how such a lever should be executed to achieve effectiveness be effective.

The paper contributes to the advancement of the brand love literature by clarifying whether, and under what circumstances, the use of specific types of nostalgia in advertising increases consumers’ love towards a brand.

Past research suggests that heavy media multitaskers (HMMs) perform worse on tasks that require executive control, compared to light media multitaskers (LMMs). This paper aims to investigate whether individual differences between HMMs and LMMs make them respond differently to advertising in a media multitasking context and whether this stems from differences in the ability versus the motivation to regulate one’s attention. This is investigated by manipulating participants’ autonomy over attention allocation.

For the first study (n = 85), a between subjects design with three conditions was used: sequential, multitasking under low autonomy over attention allocation and multitasking under high autonomy over attention allocation. This study investigated the inhibitory control of HMMs vs LMMs in a very controlled multitasking setting. The second study (n = 91) replicated the design of study one in a more naturalistic media multitasking setting and investigated the driving role of motivation vs ability for cognitive load differences between HMMs and LMMs and the consequent impact on advertising effectiveness.

Study I suggests that HMMs perform worse on a response inhibition task than LMMs after multitasking freely (in which case motivation to regulate attention determines the process), but not after their attention was guided externally by the experimenter (in which case their motivation could no longer determine the process). Study II argues that when motivation to switch attention is at play, cognitive load differences occur between HMMs and LMMs. This study additionally reveals that under these circumstances, HMMs are more persuaded by advertisements (report higher purchase intentions) compared to LMMs, while no differences appear when only ability is at play.

Executive control exists of different components (Miyake et al., 2000). The current study only focused on the impact of media multitasking frequency on response inhibition, but it would be interesting for future research to investigate whether media multitasking frequency equally affects the other sub-dimensions. Additionally, the impairment of response inhibition has been shown to predict a large number of other behavioral and impulse-control outcomes such as unhealthy food choices and alcohol and drug use (e.g. Friese et al., 2008). Future research should consider investigating other consequences of heavy media multitasking behavior, both advertising related and unrelated.

From a practical point of view, understanding the mechanisms that are driving the effects of media multitasking on advertising effectiveness for different groups of media-consumers could make it easier for practitioners to efficiently plan their media campaigns. Based on the findings of this study, the authors can derive that HMMs will be more depleted in cognitive resources and inhibitory control when media multitasking compared to LMMs. Consequently, this makes them more prone to advertising messages. This knowledge is of great importance for advertisers who could, based here on, aim to target HMMs more often than LMMs.

Two experimental studies by the authors confirm and add value to previous academic findings about the negative relation between media multitasking frequency and tasks that demand executive control. This study contributed to the previous by investigating whether individual differences between heavy and light media multitaskers make them respond differently toward advertising and whether the driving mechanism of these differences is a lack of motivation or ability to efficiently shift attention.