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Previous research on advertising in digital contexts has emphasized its persuasive and information processing roles for the customer. This paper aims to problematize this point of view and argues that the converged and interactive nature of digital media makes all advertising content into potential points of engagement in a digital media journey.

The paper is conceptual in nature and applies service logic (SL) and customer engagement to reconceptualize digital advertising and selling.

The authors present digital advertisements and digital media content as elements that contribute to a digital media journey, which ideally leads to a purchase. Advertising content is regarded as a resource used by consumers in their underlying value-creating processes. Thus, the digital advertising process is conceptualized as a customer-driven process of engaging with digital media content, where a purchase is incorporated in (and naturally follows from) the theme of engagement.

The paper introduces the concept of contextually embedded selling, which refers to a process where digital advertising content is thematically congruent with the surrounding editorial content, so that both contribute to the same consumer journey. Otherwise, consumers experience a contextual jump – a disconnect in theme, place or time during the consumer’s process of engagement with the digital content.

The paper contributes to advertising theory on advertising, engagement and the emerging research on consumer journey design by presenting an approach based on SL, namely, contextually embedded digital selling.

This study aims to provide nuanced insights into the effectiveness of digital outdoor advertising in redefining urban tourism appeal. Amidst a transformative era for urban tourism and city branding strategies, this study evaluates Tecoration’s influence on city branding and tourism promotion frameworks. Using the “Wave” digital outdoor advertising campaign in Seoul as a focal point, this analysis explores how such innovative marketing efforts reshape potential tourists’ perceptions and intentions toward visiting Seoul.

The study uses a bifurcated methodological framework. The initial phase undertakes a granular topical analysis, decoding keyword patterns from YouTube video commentaries, offering an unmediated insight into viewer sentiment. This is juxtaposed with a structural equation modeling technique in the subsequent phase, which serves to validate and triangulate the findings of the primary analysis.

The study reveals that viewer reactions, imbued with a sense of surprise attributable to both the content’s novelty and the technological innovation, exhibit a strong correlation with increased media engagement. This enhanced engagement significantly influences the viewers’ overall perception of the city, culminating in a marked increase in their intentions to visit Seoul.

The findings have transformative implications for city branding strategies, accentuating the potential of digital outdoor mediums. The study advocates for a paradigm shift that underscores the indispensability of Tecoration in elevating urban brand imagery and catalyzing the broader objectives of smart city metamorphosis, urban tourism rejuvenation and commercial growth trajectories.

The results of this research highlight the transformative potential of digital outdoor media in city branding. The findings suggest a shift in strategy, emphasizing the critical role of Tecoration in enhancing urban brand imagery, driving smart city development, revitalizing urban tourism and fostering commercial growth. This study underscores the strategic importance of integrating Tecoration into the urban branding framework, showcasing its vital contribution to the growth and dynamism of modern cities.

The findings of this study highlight the social implications of integrating Tecoration media in urban environments. By enhancing city branding and tourism through innovative digital signage, cities can foster a more vibrant and attractive urban atmosphere, promoting community pride and engagement. Additionally, the increased visitor traffic can boost local economies and support cultural exchange, contributing to the overall social and economic well-being of urban areas. Strategic use of digital outdoor advertising can also bridge the gap between technological advancements and public spaces, creating more interactive and inclusive urban experiences for residents and tourists alike.

This study embraces a viewer-centric perspective, delving into the relatively uncharted realms of surprise and media engagement within the digital consumption landscape. By adopting this innovative angle, the research significantly deepens the comprehension of viewer experiences and broadens the academic boundaries concerning city branding and media effect frameworks in management literature.

Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are increasingly communicating and interacting with stakeholders through digital media. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the SME owner-managers’ attitudes toward the pace of technological innovation, and it examines their perceived use and ease of digital media for stakeholder engagement.

The research methodology integrated measuring items from the technology acceptance model, the pace of technological innovation and corporate social responsibility, to better understand the SME owner-managers’ rationale for using digital media. The respondents were expected to reveal their attitudes toward commercial, ethical and social responsibilities.

A factor analysis indicated that the SME owner-managers were perceiving the usefulness of digital media to engage with marketplace stakeholders. Whilst, a stepwise regression analysis reported positive and significant relationships between the pace of technological innovation and the SMEs’ perceived usefulness of digital media for communication purposes. The results also revealed that young owner-managers from large SMEs were more likely to utilize digital media than their smaller counterparts.

This contribution implies that both small and micro businesses are utilizing digital media to improve their stakeholder engagement. This study indicates that the pace of technological innovation, the SMEs’ perceived ease of use of digital media, as well as their commercial responsibility were significant antecedents for the SMEs’ online communication.

Businesses are increasingly using corporate communication technologies to interact with prospective customers. Therefore, this study explores the corporate executives’ readiness to use interactive media for engagement with online users. The methodology relied on valid and reliable measures to explore the participants’ pace of technological innovation (PTI), perceived usefulness, ease of use and social influences, as these factors can have an effect on their engagement with interactive technologies. The findings supported the scales’ content validity as the structural equation modeling approach has reported a satisfactory fit for this study’s research model. The results indicated that the PTI, perceived usefulness, ease of use of online technologies as well as social influences were significant antecedents for the marketing executives’ engagement with online users through digital media. There were significant influences from the demographic variables, including age, gender and experiences that moderated these relationships. In conclusion, this contribution identifies its limitations and suggests possible research avenues to academia.

With the growing popularity of digital engagement, this study explores the interrelationships among digital engagement, interactivity and engagement strategies from the perspective of practitioners.

Individual in-depth interviews were conducted with 27 practitioners who have been involved in marketing communication activities in Hong Kong.

It was found that practitioners interpreted digital engagement mainly from the cognitive and behavioral dimensions and organizations engaged with their target audiences with either transactional or transitional communications. Functional interactivity and medium interactivity were perceived as the basis of digital engagement.

This qualitative analysis enriches the extant literature in marketing and public relations by delineating the relationships between interactivity and the use of different levels of digital engagement strategies, as well as guiding practitioners in setting effective digital engagement strategies.

Dubbed as the “first digital generation,” the millennials (or Generation Y) have been ensconced in digital technologies throughout their lives. As a demographic cohort, the eldest members of Generation Y were the first to reach adulthood by 2001, which heralded the third millennium, and were, therefore, called the millennials.

This research study theorizes that the millennials are ushering an emerging post-digital era that is redefining how we live, work, and play. By situating media consumption within a cross-disciplinary context of mediated engagement, this study analyzed how millennials consume media based on a 2019 meta-analytical research analysis of 22 cross-disciplinary studies, published between 2015 and 2019.

This research study analyzes how millennials curate and engage with digital media and information content in the midst of incessant evolutions of their identity, media use, and digital life. This study explicates six theoretical insights into how millennials consume information and engage with media. In their pursuit of easy access to media, the millennials get most of their information and media content from social media.

In theorizing how millennials engage with digital media, this study explicates important conceptual trends such as incidental news exposure (INE), which refers to people stumbling upon news stories they otherwise would not have purposefully seen or sought. INE spawns “bumpers” who involuntarily bump into news items, as opposed to “seekers” who actively search or seek news content. This leads to the news-finds-me mindset among some passive news consumers who rely and expect other active news consumers to share important news and information.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of visual communications on Instagram users’ propensity to engage with image-based content through online behaviors such as liking, sharing, commenting and following, and their intention to purchase the product depicted in the visual communications.

An experimental design was used to measure the effect of branded Instagram images on a sample of active Instagram users. Two features of Instagram images (subject’s gaze: direct vs indirect; product salience: low vs high) were manipulated and their interactive effect tested on online behaviors.

The paper offers empirical evidence that direct gaze and high product salience positively affect digital visual engagement. Moreover, digital visual engagement influences intention to purchase.

The hypotheses were tested on a single product category and on only two image-based features. Further studies might replicate the experiment on different product categories and include different image-based features.

This empirical study can offer communication managers important information on the image-based features that are most effective in increasing digital visual engagement and positively influencing purchase intentions in visual communications.

The study empirically demonstrates that the choice of specific image-based features in visual communication matters for increasing digital visual engagement among Instagram users.

This study examines the direct and indirect effect mechanisms of how using smartphones for social media is associated with college students' civic engagement via levels of communication network heterogeneity and social capital. In addition, this study tests whether such indirect effects mechanisms are moderated by the need to belong.

The study analyzes data from an online survey (N = 580) conducted at a public university. The PROCESS macro is used to examine the mediation association between mobile social media use, communication network heterogeneity, social capital, and civic engagement and the moderated mediation conditional upon need to belong.

College students who often use smartphones for social media were more likely to communicate with people who have different socio-demographic characteristics and different opinions. There was also a positive mediation mechanism between smartphone use for social media, network heterogeneity, social capital and civic engagement, which means that college students who often use mobile social media are more likely to communicate with heterogeneous others and develop a sense of social capital, which in turn led to greater levels of civic engagement. Importantly, these indirect effects of smartphone use for social media on civic engagement were stronger for those with greater levels of need to belong.

The findings of the current study are significant given that little is known about how young adults' mobile social media use is associated with communication network heterogeneity and civic engagement in their everyday life. The research expands the research agenda by investigating the most popular interactive communication media platforms.

The purpose of this chapter is to assess the social significance of digital technologies for researching and understanding active women's bodies, identities, practices, and politics. In critically surveying the rapidly expanding body of literature on women's social media use for sport and physical activity, the chapter highlights the multidisciplinary nature of much of this work and its feminist and social justice orientation toward understanding the uneven impacts of platformed engagement for women, particularly those who are socially marginalized.

The chapter synthesizes the current literature to identify feminist and sociological approaches to analyzing sporting women's social media use. It draws on the authors' own research as case study illustrations of key developments.

Findings identify opportunities and challenges for women navigating the complexities of social media encounters in their sporting and physical cultural lives, focusing on self-presentation, branding and digital labor, community-building, and activism. It proposes theoretical, methodological, and ethical directions for sociological interventions in this area of study.

Future research should investigate the rapidly evolving digital landscape, issues of social justice and marginalized voices, and the social conditions that sustain gender inequalities in sport and social media spaces.

The chapter contributes original insights on emerging directions in the study of women, sport, and social media. Furthermore, it addresses the challenges for social researchers responding to the uptake of new social media platforms by female athletes and physically active women.

Brands are investing heavily in content marketing within digital communication channels, yet there is limited understanding of the effectiveness of this content on consumer engagement. This paper aims to examine how consumer engagement with branded content is created through consumer-initiated online brand communities (OBCs) and brand-initiated digital content marketing (DCM) communications. Self-brand connections are examined as an important antecedent to the cognitive, affective, behavioural and social dimensions of consumer engagement and the subsequent impact of engagement on loyalty is explored across these two channels.

A survey approach was used with two consumer samples for one focal retail brand, namely, a consumer-initiated OBC (Facebook) and email subscribers of the retail brand’s DCM communications. A multi-group analysis of structural invariance procedure was used to comparatively examine the formation of engagement for consumers within the OBC and DCM channels.

This study demonstrates the different ways in which engagement forms across different digital communication channels. Self-brand connection (SBC) was found to strongly drive behavioural, cognitive, affective and social engagement. The cognitive, affective and behavioural engagement was found to mediate the self-brand connection and consumer loyalty relationship. Overall, this relationship was most strongly and significantly mediated by affective and cognitive engagement within the OBC channel when compared to the DCM channel.

The findings of this study should be interpreted with several limitations in mind. First, the research was conducted within the confines of one OBC, within one social networking site platform characterised by self-selected membership based on a passion and immersion with the brand. This means that consumers within the OBC were highly connected to one another and the retail brand and highly socialised in-group norms and mores. This type and intensity of connection may not be the case for all forms of OBCs. Second, this study was limited to one retail brand, from one brand category. Future research should examine OBCs across a range of utilitarian and hedonic brands to comprehensively contextualise the dimensions of engagement. Third, the data for this study was cross-sectional. The use of netnographic analysis and qualitative interviews across a range of OBCs would support the triangulation of the findings of this research, especially with regard to the narrative that consumers’ express when discussing how their SBC manifests through the dimensions of engagement. Fourth, this study explored a single antecedent of engagement, namely, self-brand connections. Future research may consider how SBC operates in conjunction with other complementary factors to enhance consumers’ affective, cognitive, social and behavioural engagement such as brand awareness, satisfaction and participation/interactivity. In addition, future research could examine an expanded array of engagement outcomes such as purchase intention, the share of wallet and reputation. Finally, future research should examine the operationalisation and validation of the dimensions of engagement using multiple competing scales to assess the suitability of these engagement scales across multiple brand categories and contexts.

Given the increasing investment in branding within social media and the fragmentation of brand communications across multiple communications platforms, the management of effective brand communications remains a significant challenge. This study found that the relationship between self-brand connections, affective, social, behavioural and cognitive engagement and loyalty was context-specific and moderated by a digital communication channel (OBC vs DCM email marketing), thus providing insights as to the effectiveness of OBCs and DCMs as two tools for enhancing consumer loyalty.

This study makes a novel contribution to the engagement literature by examining the antecedent role of self-brand connections in predicting consumers’ engagement; the moderating role of digital communication platforms (OBC vs DCM) on the formation of cognitive, affective, behavioural and social engagement; and the mediating effect of these dimensions on loyalty.