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This study aims to examine the content of health promotional web sites in two culturally distinct countries, the USA and South Korea, by investigating the level of interactivity and types of advertising appeals presented on antismoking web sites.

Antismoking web sites in the two countries were collected through the three major search engines (msn, Yahoo and Google) using relevant keywords. The final sample contained a total of 89 web sites (USA=67, South Korea=22) that met the condition of promoting antismoking behavior rather than just selling antismoking products. Three bilingual coders were hired for the analysis.

The South Korean antismoking web sites presented significantly higher levels of interactivity than their USA counterparts. By contrast, there is hardly any differentiation between the two countries in the amount of advertising appeals used on the health web sites.

Even though antismoking is certainly an important global issue, the findings related to antismoking web sites may not be generalizable to various other health‐related topics. Future research should replicate our findings on interactivity and advertising appeals in the context of various health issues.

To cross‐cultural researchers, the results provide more theoretical and practical rationales for cross‐cultural differences beyond such well‐known typologies as Hofstede's Individualism/Collectivism and Hall's high‐low context.

This study provided at least two useful findings for practitioners and researchers: better definition of the roles of cultural differences in the level of interactivity and the types of advertising appeals in promoting health information online and a broadening of the scope of cross‐cultural advertising research to health promotional contexts online.

This study aims to examine the extent to which anti‐smoking websites use intervention strategies that have been informed by four prominent theories of health‐related behavior change: the health belief model, the theory of reasoned action/theory of planned behavior, the transtheoretical model, and social cognitive theory.

Content analysis was applied to 67 unique and independent anti‐smoking websites to determine their use of 20 intervention strategies based on the four theories.

The findings reveal that anti‐smoking websites used the health belief model the most and social cognitive theory the least. In addition, websites devoted to smoking cessation used these theories more extensively than websites devoted to smoking prevention.

The sample size is somewhat small, which may result in lack of sufficient statistical power. Also, the analysis may have overlooked some important intervention strategies that are particularly effective for smoking intervention programs.

Anti‐smoking website designers should take more advantage of the internet as a health promotion medium and use more intervention strategies that have been informed by scientifically tested theories of behavior change, particularly with respect to affective and behavioral strategies.

This study contributes to current knowledge about which kinds of anti‐smoking messages are available online and how extensively they employ theory‐based intervention strategies.

Consumers are assumed to engage in external information search only after exhausting their internal information sources. Guided by the accessibility/diagnosticity and ease-of-retrieval frameworks, and the elaboration likelihood model, the current study investigates this phenomenon.

To test the relationships between internal information accessibility/diagnosticity and the importance of external search, and the moderating role of involvement in these relationships, 308 responses were collected on Amazon MTurk. Then, structural equation modeling was employed to analyze the data.

The analyses showed that while accessibility and diagnosticity of internal information have an impact on external information search, involvement with the product class has a consequential moderating effect on these relationships. In particular, in the low-involvement group, only the diagnosticity of internal information had a negative effect on external information search. On the contrary, in the high-involvement group, only accessibility of internal information had a negative effect.

These findings highlight the possibility of drawing erroneous conclusions resulting from not incorporating involvement, in conjunction with information accessibility and diagnosticity, in the study of the consumer external information search behavior.

The findings also imply that if practitioners aim to prime consumers to engage in external information search, they need to take into account that the effects of internal information's accessibility and diagnosticity on consumers' external search behavior may be different depending on their levels of involvement.

This study's results showed that without considering the moderating effect of involvement, spurious conclusions may be made about the relationships between accessibility and diagnosticity of internal and external information importance. This finding may explain the discrepancy between the accessibility/diagnosticity and ease-of-retrieval frameworks, thus enriching the literature.