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The necessity of developing effective and innovative primary prevention strategies is a pressing objective in stemming the harm caused by the production and consumption of child sexual exploitation material (CSEM). Digital media interventions - including search engine advertisements - hold promise as prevention tools to deflect potential users away from CSEM and redirect them to therapeutic services. This study aimed to establish an evidence base for effective advertising in this context by creating mock-up helpline advertisements and testing them in focus groups and interviews with staff and clients of New Zealand's major treatment service providers for harmful sexual behavior. Prior to testing these advertisements in situ (on online platforms), this paper reports on a foundational creative and qualitative investigation of effective advertisements - what imagery, text, and design features are most likely to succeed in diverting people away from seeking CSEM and encouraging them to reach out to a helpline? The findings of this study offer deeper understanding of the mindset, emotions, and barriers to reaching out that are experienced by onset CSEM users, as well as suitability of certain imagery and text for advertising in this context, and thereby contribute to strengthening primary prevention efforts in combatting CSEM consumption.

As a result of the increasing role of online advertising and strong competition among advertisers, intrusive techniques are commonly used to attract web users' attention. Moreover, since marketing content is usually delivered to the target audience when they are performing typical online tasks, like searching for information or reading online content, its delivery interrupts the web user's current cognitive process. The question posed by many researchers in the field of online advertising is: how should we measure the influence of interruption of cognitive processes on human behavior and emotional state? Much research has been conducted in this field; however, most of this research has focused on monitoring activity in the simulated environment, or processing declarative responses given by users in prepared questionnaires. In this paper, a more direct real-time approach is taken, and the effect of the interruption on a web user is analyzed directly by studying the activity of his brain. This paper presents the results of an experiment that was conducted to find the brain activity patterns associated with interruptions of the cognitive process by showing internet advertisements during a text-reading task. Three specific aspects were addressed in the experiment: individual patterns, the consistency of these patterns across trials, and the intra-subject correlation of the individual patterns. Two main effects were observed for most subjects: a drop in activity in the frontal and prefrontal cortical areas across all frequency bands, and significant changes in the frontal/prefrontal asymmetry index.

Background: Although hundreds of millions of dollars are spent each year on public health advertising, the advertisement content, design, and placement are usually developed by intuition rather than research., Objective: The objective of our study was to develop a methodology for testing Web-based advertisements to promote smoking cessation., Methods: We developed 10 advertisements that varied by their content (those that empower viewers to quit, help viewers to quit, or discuss the effects of smoking). We then conducted a series of Web-based randomized controlled trials that explored the effects of exposing users of Microsoft's Bing search engine to antismoking advertisements that differed by content, placement, or other characteristics. Finally, we followed users to explore whether they conducted subsequent searches for smoking cessation products or services., Results: The advertisements were shown 710,106 times and clicked on 1167 times. In general, empowering advertisements had the greatest impact (hazard ratio [HR] 2.6, standard error [SE] 0.09 relative to nonempowering advertisements), but we observed significant variations by gender. For instance, we found that men exposed to smoking cessation advertisements were less likely than women to subsequently conduct smoking cessation searches (HR 0.2, SE 0.07), but that this likelihood increased 3.5 times in men exposed to advertisements containing empowering content. Women were more influenced by advertisements that emphasized the health effects of smoking. We also found that appearing at the top right of the page (HR 2.1, SE 0.07) or at the bottom rather than the top of a list (HR 1.1, SE 0.02) can improve smoking cessation advertisements' effectiveness in prompting future searches related to smoking cessation., Conclusions: Advertising should be targeted to different demographic groups in ways that are not always intuitive. Our study provides a method for testing the effectiveness of Web-based antismoking advertisements and demonstrates the importance of advertisements that are tailored according to specific demographics., Competing Interests: The authors report no conflicts of interest., (©Elad Yom-Tov, Peter Muennig, Abdulrahman M El-Sayed. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (http://www.jmir.org), 21.11.2016.)

The Internet has revolutionized the way knowledge is currently produced, stored and disseminated. A few finger clicks on a keyboard can save time and many hours of search in libraries or shopping in stores. Online trademarks with an (e-) prefix such as e-library, e-business, e-health etc., are increasingly part of our daily professional vocabularies. However, the Internet has also produced multiple negative side effects, ranging from an unhealthy dependency to a dehumanization of human relationships. Fraudulent, unethical and scam practices are also flourishing through for example misleading online advertising methods. Some social and professional networks gather users' profiles for selling and advertising purposes, sometimes by making it technically difficult to unsubscribe. Here, I discuss some of these unethical aspects and propose some potential solutions to reduce them.

Online systems promise to improve advertisement targeting via the massive and detailed data available. However, there often is too few data on exactly the outcome of interest, such as purchases, for accurate campaign evaluation and optimization (due to low conversion rates, cold start periods, lack of instrumentation of offline purchases, and long purchase cycles). This paper presents a detailed treatment of proxy modeling, which is based on the identification of a suitable alternative (proxy) target variable when data on the true objective is in short supply (or even completely nonexistent). The paper has a two-fold contribution. First, the potential of proxy modeling is demonstrated clearly, based on a massive-scale experiment across 58 real online advertising campaigns. Second, we assess the value of different specific proxies for evaluating and optimizing online display advertising, showing striking results. The results include bad news and good news. The most commonly cited and used proxy is a click on an ad. The bad news is that across a large number of campaigns, clicks are not good proxies for evaluation or for optimization: clickers do not resemble buyers. The good news is that an alternative sort of proxy performs remarkably well: observed visits to the brand's website. Specifically, predictive models built based on brand site visits-which are much more common than purchases-do a remarkably good job of predicting which browsers will make a purchase. The practical bottom line: evaluating and optimizing campaigns using clicks seems wrongheaded; however, there is an easy and attractive alternative-use a well-chosen site-visit proxy instead.

Digital advertising platforms have emerged as a widely utilized data source in consumer research; yet, the interpretation of such data remains a source of confusion for many researchers. This article aims to address this issue by offering a comprehensive and accessible review of four prominent data collection methods proposed in the marketing literature: "informal studies," "multiple-ad studies without holdout," "single-ad studies with holdout," and "multiple-ad studies with holdout." By outlining the strengths and limitations of each method, we aim to enhance understanding regarding the inferences that can and cannot be drawn from the collected data. Furthermore, we present seven recommendations to effectively leverage these tools for programmatic consumer research. These recommendations provide guidance on how to use these tools to obtain causal and non-causal evidence for the effects of marketing interventions, and the associated psychological processes, in a digital environment regulated by targeting algorithms. We also give recommendations for how to describe the testing tools and the data they generate and urge platforms to be more transparent on how these tools work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the backdrop of calls for greater platform transparency, this exploratory article investigates Meta's 'Why Am I Seeing This Ad' (WAIST) feature, which is positioned as a consumer-level explanation of Meta's advertising model. Drawing on our own walkthroughs of Facebook and Instagram and data from the Australian Ad Observatory, we find the feature falls short in two ways. First, the explanations do not always align with how the system and its audience-building tools are sold to and used by advertisers. Second, the feature is focused narrowly on single ads and individual users, doing nothing to generate understanding of the patterns and sequences of targeted advertising in relation to other users or over time. We propose both platform practices and independent research strategies that could help to fill this gap between individual explanations, population-level patterns of targeted online advertising and the societal issues associated with it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary reports on gambling advertisements served to Australians on Facebook in 2021-2022 that we discovered through a research project that uses novel data donation infrastructure to improve the observability of platform-based advertising. Preliminary findings show that advertisements for online casinos appear on social media and are served to people tagged as located in Australia despite laws that prohibit both the operation and advertising of these gambling services in Australia, and in apparent contravention of company policies that require gambling advertisers to follow applicable law. We outline the harms of normalizing gambling on digital media and argue that the limited accountability of digital platforms for online advertising can contribute to these harms. We suggest ways in which the law and its enforcement and platform responsibility can be reformed to prevent harmful gambling advertising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the conducted research, the authors describe the features of brand promotion using Internet marketing tools. The key types of online advertising and their differences are given alongside with the data on the Internet advertising market and its specifics. The purpose of the study was to determine the features of brand promotion with the help of online advertising. To achieve it, the following objectives were set: to consider the available types of online advertising; to analyse the cases of 5 Russian companies; to determine the specifics of promoting companies through advertising on the Internet. The research methodology was based on the works on Internet marketing and brand promotion. The authors analysed 5 cases of large Russian companies related to Internet marketing: Aviasales, Yota, Dodo Pizza, Tinkoff Bank, Samokat. In particular, the effective influence marketing of Aviasales and its integration with Yandex were noted alongside with the use of contextual, targeted and unusual advertising by Yota to increase awareness. In addition, the features of managing SMM (social media marketing) by Dodo Pizza, effective advertising campaigns of Tinkoff Bank and commercials based on the research of the target audience of Samokat were highlighted. The following characteristics of brand promotion using online advertising were identified: interactivity, the ability to test advertising creatives, simplicity of calculating results, the need to create bright advertising campaigns in order to increase brand competitiveness.

It is surprising that women are often charged more for products and services marketed explicitly to them. This phenomenon, known as the pink tax, is a major issue that questions women's buying power. Nevertheless, it is not just limited to physical products – even online advertising can be subject to this type of gender-price discrimination. That is where our research comes in. We have developed a new methodology to measure what we call the digital marketing pink tax – the additional expense of delivering advertisements to female audiences. Analyzing data from Facebook advertising platforms across 187 countries and 40 territories shows this issue is systematic. Particularly, the digital marketing pink tax is prevalent in 79% of audiences across the world and 98% of audiences in highly developed countries. Therefore, advertisers incur a median cost of 30% more to display advertisements to women than men. In contrast, advertisers have to pay less digital marketing pink tax in less-developed countries (5%). Our research indicates that countries in the Middle East and Africa with a low Human Development Index (HDI) do not experience this phenomenon. Our comprehensive investigation of 24 industries reveals that advertisers must pay up to 64% of the digital marketing pink tax to target women in some industries. Our findings also suggest a connection between the digital marketing pink tax and the consumer pink tax – the extra charge placed on products marketed to women. Overall, our research sheds light on an important issue affecting women worldwide. Raising awareness of the digital marketing pink tax and advocating for better regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes the arguments and counterarguments within the scientific discussion on the issue of electronic advertising in Saudi Arabia. The main purpose of this research is to explore the impact of internet advertising on companies' visits to stores through an exploratory study. The systematization of literary sources and approaches for solving electronic advertising problems indicates that new mediating and moderating variables could have an impact on the relation between Internet advertising and visits to stores. In this research, the disposition to visit the point of sale is assimilated as a mediating construct rather than an implication with the product as a moderating variable. The relevance of this scientific problem decision is that this investigation of the consequences of electronic advertising for offline customer comportment in Saudi Arabia is unprecedented research that seeks to address this interesting question. The investigation of the role of online advertising and the impact of mediating and moderating variables on the visit to the store in the paper was carried out in the following logical sequence: the data were collected via an electronic survey. Of the 500 randomly selected Internet users in Saudi Arabia, only 350 responses were valid. This research used a structural equation model and multigroup analysis to examine the direct and indirect influences of variables. This paper presents the results of an empirical analysis that revealed a positive relation between internet advertising and visits to points of sale. The disposition to visit the point of sale mediates the relationship between Internet advertising and concrete visits to the store. The effect of the product moderates the effect of internet advertising on the disposition to visit the point of sale in Saudi Arabia. The research empirically confirms and theoretically proves that Saudi shoppers fine online advertising to be attractive when this advertising must have some actions and concepts flash. Therefore, Saudi directors should follow this form and use an effective mixture of content and animation. The e-shoppers who are involved are persons who have little engagement; for this reason, they are simply concerned about the tools of the publicity communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hypervideo is a selective, user-to-document, and externalexploratory interactive artefact characterised by a video backbone and clickable areas within that allow access to the desired information. Its use in education has been widely studied but there is hardly any research about advertising applications. We have addressed this gap by carrying out a content analysis on a corpus of 148 hypervideos in order to find out what brands and product types are using this tool, the structures employed, the commercial motives that they might fulfil and the appeals dimensions that are present. Our results indicate that highinvolvement products with positive motives are the most frequent. Although a third of the sample can be labelled as shoppable, the majority satisfy the motive of information-seeking by explaining the product characteristics or uses. Sometimes, this information helps to decide which product fits the user’s necessities, as well as fostering the purchase. They present interactive structures described in literature, such as the vector and the tree, but we also identified others. Soft-sell type appeals, particularly humour and storytelling, are more abundant than hard-sell strategies. All in all, this research adds to a growing body of literature on interactive advertising and provides a starting point for further research on these types of videos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The hypervideo is a selective, user-to-document, and external-exploratory interactive artefact characterised by a video backbone and clickable areas within that allow access to the desired information. Its use in education has been widely studied but there is hardly any research about advertising applications. We have addressed this gap by carrying out a content analysis on a corpus of 148 hypervideos in order to find out what brands and product types are using this tool, the structures employed, the commercial motives that they might fulfil and the appeals dimensions that are present. Our results indicate that high-involvement products with positive motives are the most frequent. Although a third of the sample can be labelled as shoppable, the majority satisfy the motive of information-seeking by explaining the product characteristics or uses. Sometimes, this information helps to decide which product fits the user’s necessities, as well as fostering the purchase. They present interactive structures described in literature, such as the vector and the tree, but we also identified others. Soft-sell type appeals, particularly humour and storytelling, are more abundant than hard-sell strategies. All in all, this research adds to a growing body of literature on interactive advertising and provides a starting point for further research on these types of videos.

Design plays a major role in online advertising. While specific aspects such as color or animation have been extensively studied, there is a surprising lack of comprehensive research on the overall impact of visual design and aesthetics. This study delved into the effects of varying levels of visual complexity in banner ads using the eye-tracking method. Out of 108 participants browsing test webpages with specially designed banners, data from 90 adequately measured data sets were used in the study. Notably, ads with a low level of visual complexity outperformed ads with a high level of visual complexity. While users noticed complex ads slightly faster (by 0.84%), they fixated on them significantly less (by 9.09%) and looked at them less frequently (by 4.79%). An implemented survey questionnaire examining the user perception of the banners reinforced the superiority of simple ads, as they were perceived as 4.40% more appealing in comparison. The study further delved into the correlation between objectively and subjectively evaluated data, exploring the credibility of subjective methods in the process. Considering our results and findings from other studies, it was evident that visually complex ads demanded more cognitive effort, could be more distracting, negatively impacted attention, could contribute to banner blindness and were perceived as less appealing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facebook advertisements are widely used in modern political campaigning and have come under tremendous scrutiny for their perceived ability to impact elections. However, there is limited evidence as to their effectiveness on voting behavior. An experiment conducted in Texas during the 2018 U.S. Midterm elections demonstrates that longitudinal exposure to issue-oriented Facebook ads may impact turnout, but that effects are conditional on an alignment of message, audience, and electoral context. Despite the large sample (N = 871,479) there is no detectable main effect of advertisements on turnout. Only individuals in competitive congressional districts assigned to receive ads about abortion rights and women's healthcare exhibited a significant increase in predicted turnout (1.66pp relative to a control group); effects were concentrated among female voters. Three other message conditions had no impact on turnout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the impact of pop-up advertisements on the purchasing behavior of young people. The study reveals that pop-up ads are effective in capturing the attention of young individuals and creating a sense of urgency, leading to impulsive buying decisions. Continuous exposure to these ads also improves the recall of product information. The findings suggest that marketers and advertisers can effectively target the younger demographic by utilizing pop-up ads. The study recommends further research on the long-term effects of exposure to pop-up ads and their impact within mobile applications and social media platforms, as well as exploring how demographic factors interact with the influence of these ads. [Extracted from the article]

Electronic cigarette brands are increasingly using social media to advertise their products. This study examined effects of advertising message claim type (reduced risk ['Healthier than regular cigarettes'], cessation ['Quit smoking using e-cigarettes'] versus no message claim) and health warning labels (presence versus absence) in celebrity-endorsed Instagram e-cigarette brand advertisements. A 3 × 2 between-subjects experiment was conducted through an online questionnaire, with participants (N = 275) randomly assigned to 1 of 6 experimental conditions. Presence of a health warning label exerted significant main effects on attitude towards the ad, intention to use e-cigarettes, and brand attitude, and interacted with message claim type to affect these dependent measures. Health consciousness, perceived information value, and celebrity identification also significantly moderated between presence of a health warning label and attitude towards the ad, intention to use e-cigarettes, and brand attitude. Presence of health warning labels in social media-based e-cigarette ads may therefore mitigate potential effects of positive advertising claims in these ads. Implications for regulatory agencies and future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ad targeting technology has enabled a highly personalized delivery of online ads. Behind this development is the belief that better targeting will lead to more relevant ads. This paper challenges this lay belief by showing that irrelevant advertising can arise not necessarily from technological imperfection but also from the incentive problem embedded in the ad agency-advertisers relationship. We first demonstrate that the ad agency serving multiple advertisers may strategically allocate an ad impression to a lesser-matched, sometimes totally irrelevant, niche advertiser because future impressions can match better with the mainstream advertiser. We further find that, without a contractual obligation to serve both advertisers, the agency may not deliver completely irrelevant ads to consumers. However, another type of inefficiency can arise where the agency may not send any ad to potentially interested consumers who have a strictly positive match probability with advertisers. These inefficiencies arise due to contractual restrictions, either contractual obligations or budget constraints, when the agency serves multiple advertisers. As such, we endogenize the advertisers' contractual requirement choices and show how the contractual obligation(s) can arise in equilibrium. Finally, we show that irrelevant ads will not disappear simply because more impressions are available in the market. Our analysis suggests that as the number of impressions increases, the irrelevant ads can persist, but the probability of receiving irrelevant ads decreases. This paper was accepted by Dmitri Kuksov, marketing. Funding: W. Shin gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Brian R. Gamache Endowed Professorship at the University of Florida. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4605. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research focuses on investigating the presence of effects of Online Advertising, Website Features, and Pop-up ads on Millennials Buying Behavior. Millennials are one of the biggest groups of people in the population, therefore, it is important to understand the effect of these variables on their behavior. The study focuses on the Millennials and their buying behaviors, objectively, as well as it encompasses the millennials of the whole region. The tests conducted for the study, reveal that there is a positive impact of online advertising on millennials buying behavior, but there is a negative relation between female millennials and online buying behavior; thus, providing another research area, as to why online advertising is considered differently by the two genders. However, website features have a positive effect on millennials buying behavior. Whereas the research also establishes that pop-up ads have a negative effect on millennials buying behavior, due to their recurrence. It is an interesting finding since pop-up ads are still utilized by e-businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much like in traditional media contexts, advertising is a key source of revenue in digital media industries. One popular form is web search advertising, which is targeted based on words. But there has been little critical empirical research into how web search advertising is achieved in practice. Based on in-depth interviews with web search advertising professionals, this article examines how these professionals make sense of Google's "linguistic capitalism." It identifies three salient contextual factors that influence the valuation of words (locality, semantic footprints, and governance) and four semantic practices that advertising professionals mobilize to grapple with the meaning of words when (e)valuating them (attaching meaning, ascribing intention, algorithmic association, and measuring relevance). It also reveals the importance of semantic practices for the commodification of words, which depends on, and ultimately reaffirms, Google's semantic power. Overall, this article contributes to the critical literature on web search and meaning-making in algorithmic media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global population post-pandemic has stimulated the sustainability movement worldwide, where consumers have transitioned from offline to online businesses. Increased sustainable users lead to companies actively promoting their products using social media advertisements. Despite the progress in the market, the literature on social media advertisement for sustainable brands in developing countries, including Malaysia, is relatively scarce. Hence, this study seeks to enhance understanding online advertisement value by incorporating the Ducoffe advertising value model. Specifically, the factors determining customers' advertising value based on credibility, perceived entertainment, and informativeness were examined using user-generated video (UGV) as a moderator. Data were gathered from 250 Generation Z in Malaysia, while the proposed conceptual model was assessed using the Partial Least Squares (PLS) method. The findings revealed a significant direct relationship between informativeness and a significant indirect relationship between UGV in advertisements toward sustainable product purchase intention. Conversely, no significant connection between credibility and perceived entertainment was discovered. The results significantly contribute to sustainability literature and advertisement strategy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Businesses are increasingly delegating activities in the advertising process to dominant online advertising platforms. This delegation yields the ad platforms tremendous power, akin to the principal–agent dilemma discussed in economics. One of the major platforms is called Google Ads—this platform is the focal point of our study. Over the years, Google has made substantial changes to its platform's features, which, in turn, govern what is possible and what is not for the advertisers. These changes impact the advertisers' ability to act independently and make their own choices, referred to as human agency. To better understand this impact, we examined 362 industry news articles reporting changes in Google Ads from 2015 to 2020. The findings indicate that while most changes increase human agency, this effect is becoming weaker over time, driven by automation. To better understand advertisers' attitudes towards automation, we surveyed 193 advertisers with Google Ads experience. Contrary to the popular belief that marketers are afraid of being replaced by algorithms, we found this to not be the case. Even though most advertisers indicated appreciation for maintaining their human agency, they did not perceive this agency being violated by the ad platform. However, we did observe interesting variability among respondents, reflected in three computational advertising attitude types: tinkerers, instrumentalists, and shepherds. We discuss the implications for advertisers in terms of strategizing in the face of reduced human agency and for ad platforms in terms of designing features that advertisers perceive as fair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents a new type of advertisement—web-series ads. This undiscussed form of advertising is unique, as it presents an independent digital cultural field. By examining the main structural and narrative features of web-series ads and consumers’ responses, this research presents an integration model which explains how advertisements, as a commercial system, integrate into an independent new media system. Using thematic, narrative–structural, and textual analysis methods, this research shows how marketers convey messaging by introducing a free-from-constraints new online advertising media type. The use of polysystem theory offers a new theoretical perspective to media research and explains the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study develops a conceptual framework of advertising intrusiveness that extends previous research on the topic by examining both drivers and consequences. To achieve this, the work draws on in-depth interviews with 29 adult consumers who report experiencing intrusive advertising in their daily lives. Three drivers of advertising intrusiveness are identified - temporal disruption, visual disruption and flow disruption - along with three consequences - emotional response, behavioural response and cognitive response. From these drivers and consequences, a conceptual framework of advertising intrusiveness is developed based on ideas about psychological reactance. Based on this framework it is proposed that, while all advertisements might ultimately be perceived as intrusive, an advertisement’s characteristics, which are the identified subcomponents of the drivers of intrusiveness, exacerbate the resultant consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the challenge of replacing retiring workers with new talent, recruitment ads on recruitment platforms are becoming increasingly sophisticated and personalized. On some platforms, recruiters can now integrate users' names and photographs into recruitment ads. Previous research has frequently found that ad personalization improves advertising effectiveness; however, personalization is not always an effective tactic, as personalization effects can be nuanced depending on the consumer and the ad's personalized elements. A between-subjects experiment (N = 196) tested the effects of different types of recruitment ad personalization (integration of the recipient's name only or of both the recipient's name and photograph). This research found recruitment ads that were personalized with potential applicants' names and photographs increased organizational attractiveness for potential applicants who exhibited low involvement in the ad's message. In turn, their intentions to click on the ad and pursue the advertised job opportunity also increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social ads offer multiple advantages to advertisers, including a rapid increase in the visibility of brands and their services. Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads are among the most popular advertising solutions worldwide. This research analyzes the advertising actions carried out on these platforms by the Spanish universities with the largest number of students. The results corroborate the continuous evolution of online advertising. This work also reveals new developments and trends of the main brands in the education sector implemented in social ads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of this research is to investigate how price information in online display advertisements affects the consumer's internal reference price (IRP). The internet context differs from prior pricing research contexts in which consumers allocate all or none of their conscious attention to price stimuli. In this context, consumers allocate some of their attention to ads, but they do so incidentally. Across four studies, we show that these incidental exposures to price information in online ads influence the IRP. The results suggest that the price magnitude used in the online ad (either low or high) determines the price anchoring mechanism at play. The price magnitude in conjunction with ad repetition and ad type (price comparing ad vs. single price ad) also affect the consumer's IRP. By uncovering these effects in online display advertising, this research contributes to pricing and online advertising research and provides specific insights for online marketers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This empirical study examines the effects of user generated vlogs (UGV) versus brand generated ads (BGA) on consumer decisions on YouTube. UGV refers to any type of review video content about brands or products, created and published by users on YouTube. BGA refers to brand generated advertisements on YouTube. Guided by the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion, this online experimental research involved a 2 (source: UGV versus BGA) X 2 (involvement: high versus low) X 2 (gender: male versus female) between-subjects research design. Results showed that UGV elicited significantly greater effects on consumer brand attitudes and purchase intentions than BGA, when involvement was high. No significant gender differences were observed. In a constantly growing YouTube influencer economy, this study offers important theoretical and managerial implications.

Online forms of sexual violence, such as image-based sexual harassment and abuse, can have serious consequences for victims' well-being. Still, not every victim seeks help. Therefore, the present study examined the engagement of youth with advertisements on Snapchat for the promotion of help-seeking at a victim support organization after image-based sexual harassment and abuse victimization. Two advertising campaigns, focusing on either image-based sexual harassment or abuse, were run on Snapchat targeted at 13-to-25-year-old Dutch users. A 2 x 2 x 2 quasi-experimental design was implemented, manipulating three variables in each campaign to measure the engagement (ratio of swipe-ups to impressions) generated by each advertisement variation. The analyses indicate that 2.93% and 3.79% of Snapchat users engaged with the image-based sexual harassment and abuse campaigns respectively. A significant increase in engagement was found in the image-based sexual abuse campaign when self-blame was mentioned in the advertisement. The acknowledgement of self-blame, a well-known barrier to help-seeking, and the reassurance that one is not to blame, may be beneficial in promoting help-seeking. In conclusion, the use of social media advertising by victim support organizations may be effective in promoting help-seeking. Further research on the role of personal characteristics on advertisement engagement is encouraged. • Social media advertising may be beneficial for reaching victims of image-based sexual harassment and abuse. • Snapchat advertising may be effective in promoting help-seeking after image-based sexual harassment and abuse victimization. • The content of the advertisement may influence the Snapchat users' engagement with the advertisement. • Acknowledging self-blame and reassuring that the victim is not to blame increases engagement with the advertisement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The purpose of this study is to describe consumers' perceptions of YouTube commercials and to examine the impact of consumer perception on the product image. Online media aids in the efficient or wider reach of advertisements. However, several studies have found that consumers are upset by video commercials and thus use skip ad features. The disparity between consumer perceptions of YouTube ads and marketer perceptions of Youtube ads may result in unproductive marketer advertising decisions when selecting the YouTube platform. Methods: According to Dharmasraya Central Statistic Department data, the research population is Youtube users who live in four districts with a total population of 120.979 persons. Non-probability sampling was used to determine the research sample. Using Isaac and Michael's sampling formula, the sample size is 347 people. Product image is the dependent variable, and the independent factors are irritation, informativeness, and purchase. To collect data, valid and reliable questionnaires with a five-stage Likert scale were employed, and SPSS 20.0 was used to assess the study hypotheses. Results: The results demonstrate that customer impression of irritation toward YouTube advertisements has little effect on the product image, however informativeness of YouTube ads and purchase have a substantial effect on the product image. Variable independence has a large and simultaneous impact on the product image. Conclusion and suggestion: This finding indicates that respondent perceptions of how informative YouTube commercials are and their product purchase experiences based on YouTube ads have a favorable and significant impact on product images displayed on YouTube. Other findings show that regardless of how frequently respondents skip YouTube commercials and feel irritated by unskippable ads, product image advertising on YouTube is not significantly affected by variable irritation. Further research could include expanding the research sample to additional districts in Dharmasraya or other rural locations to learn more about how people interpret YouTube commercials and act based on what they see. As a result, a suitable YouTube ad is designed to help the promotion of current local products/services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the Internet was closely followed by the emergence of a new advertising medium - Online Advertising. Its rapid growth owes much to the tremendous advancements of the so-called Advertising Technology or AdTech. The AdTech improvements led to a substantial reduction in the cost of targeting and, consequently, to increased media investments from advertisers. Programmatic advertising, the most technologically advanced form of online advertising, makes use of advanced media trading algorithms, including machine learning. It involves a high degree of technological complexity coupled with a lack of transparency and has many advertisers complaining that it works like a 'black box'. The main technological evolutions that shaped the industry will be critically analysed, with a focus on the effects of this growing technological complexity over the market structure. The emergence of ever-more complex industry algorithms was fuelled by a growing quantity of user data and led to complaints from the general public and, recently, to legal actions against the two companies that dominate the market, Google and Facebook. Following an overview of the settled and ongoing legal cases, we conclude that the impact of the rulings, especially the potential ban on the use of 3rd party cookies, could present a huge challenge for advertisers and completely transform the industry. Non-cookie based solutions will need to be developed, but this could negatively impact the advertisers' results. The Online Advertising industry, as a whole, will need to completely rethink its way of functioning, evolving towards a more sustainable and privacy-respectful business model. Our paper aims to present the emergence of Online Advertising, its evolution in the past three decades, the role of Advertising Technology (AdTech) in shaping the industry's practices and the impact of the legal actions it is currently confronted with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Featured Application: This work can be applied to support decisions to discontinue ad creatives, which is expected to reduce the load of ad operators. Currently, our framework is deployed in a production environment and provides predictions for our internal operators. Based on the predictions, we have discussions with the operations team to improve the operation efficiency. Discontinuing ad creatives at an appropriate time is one of the most important ad operations that can have a significant impact on sales. Such operational support for ineffective ads has been less explored than that for effective ads. After pre-analyzing 1,000,000 real-world ad creatives, we found that there are two types of discontinuation: short-term (i.e., cut-out) and long-term (i.e., wear-out). In this paper, we propose a practical prediction framework for the discontinuation of ad creatives with a hazard function-based loss function inspired by survival analysis. Our framework predicts the discontinuations with a multi-modal deep neural network that takes as input the ad creative (e.g., text, categorical, image, numerical features). To improve the prediction performance for the two different types of discontinuations and for the ad creatives that contribute to sales, we introduce two new techniques: (1) a two-term estimation technique with multi-task learning and (2) a click-through rate-weighting technique for the loss function. We evaluated our framework using the large-scale ad creative dataset, including 10 billion scale impressions. In terms of the concordance index (short: 0.896, long: 0.939, and overall: 0.792), our framework achieved significantly better performance than the conventional method (0.531). Additionally, we confirmed that our framework (i) demonstrated the same degree of discontinuation effect as manual operations for short-term cases, and (ii) accurately predicted the ad discontinuation order, which is important for long-running ad creatives for long-term cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Targeted advertising is online advertising that focuses on the behavior of the consumer to give them a specific advertisement. Literature on targeted advertising focused mainly on the strategy crossing the personal boundaries of the consumers and how fields of marketing, finance, advertising, etc., are benefitting from the algorithmic profiling of personalized advertising. Findings revealed the negative sides of personalized advertising, such as advertising irritation and negative attitudes towards targeted ads. We argue that the focus is limited; thus, we aim to determine the perception of users towards targeted advertising and utilize it to identify the influence of their perception on their purchasing behavior, examine if there is a correlation between their demographic and their perception of targeted advertising. The study site are respondents who have experience in online shopping residing in the National Capital Region of the Philippines. We were able to gather the data through disseminating Google forms and utilized the purposive sampling technique in segmenting the respondents. In the survey of N=261 respondents, the result reveals that consumers are completely concerned and interested in their personal information online but perceive targeted advertising as personalization, hence, will continue their purchase as it adds ease to their online shopping experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the welfare implications of consumer data sharing, and restrictions to that sharing, in the context of online targeted advertising. Targeting technologies offer firms the ability to reach desired audiences through intermediary platforms. The platforms run auctions in real time to display ads on internet sites, leveraging consumers' personal information collected online to personalize the ads. The online advertising industry posits that targeted advertising benefits advertising firms (that is, merchants who want to target ads to the desired consumers), consumers who see ads for preferred products, and the intermediary platforms that match consumers with firms. However, the claims that targeted advertising benefits all players involved have not been fully vetted in the literature. We develop an analytical model to analyze the economic and welfare implications of targeting technologies for those three players under alternative consumer information regimes. The regimes differ in the type and amount of consumer data available to the intermediary and to the advertising firms, and reflect the presence or absence of technological or regulatory restrictions to personal information flows. We find evidence of incentive misalignment among the players, as the intermediary prefers to share only a subset of consumer information with firms, whereas advertising firms prefer having complete information about the consumers. As such, a strategic intermediary with the ability to control which information is shared during the auction can have an incentive to use only the information that maximizes its payoff, overlooking the interests of both advertising firms and consumers. The information regimes that maximize consumer welfare vastly differ depending on consumers' heterogeneity along two dimensions: a horizontal dimension, capturing consumer's heterogeneity in product preferences; and a vertical dimension, capturing consumers' heterogeneity in purchase power. Consumers prefer none of their personal information to be used for targeting only in limited circumstances. Otherwise, consumers are either indifferent or prefer only specific types of information to be used for targeting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An experiment was conducted with the goal of determining how mood and arousal influence the way consumers process ad information in a search engine result page (SERP) environment. By focusing on the relationships among mood, arousal, and search ad snippet length, the study shows that mood and arousal states influence information processing (heuristic vs. systematic) on search pages both independently and jointly. Using the heuristic-systematic model, the present research explains how information processing modes triggered by mood and amplified by arousal shape the processing and evaluations of search ads with different snippet lengths. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 2 decades, the Internet has transformed our lives, becoming the most frequently used means of communication. Unlike traditional media, the Internet has also become a very important advertising tool thanks to its versatility, interactivity and ability to target relevant consumers. This article analyses consumers’ perception of online advertising, based on by research carried out on a sample of 50 participants. This paper will outline trends in the advertising environment in Romania.

Search advertising, a popular method for online marketing, has been employed to improve health by eliciting positive behavioral change. However, writing effective advertisements requires expertise and experimentation, which may not be available to health authorities wishing to elicit such changes, especially when dealing with public health crises such as epidemic outbreaks. Here, we develop a framework, comprising two neural network models, that automatically generates ads. The framework first employs a generator model, which creates ads from web pages. These ads are then processed by a translation model, which transcribes ads to improve performance. We trained the networks using 114K health-related ads shown on Microsoft Advertising. We measure ad performance using the click-through rates (CTR). Our experiments show that the generated advertisements received approximately the same CTR as human-authored ads. The marginal contribution of the generator model was, on average, 28% lower than that of human-authored ads, while the translator model received, on average, 32% more clicks than human-authored ads. Our analysis shows that, when compared to human-authored ads, both the translator model and the combined generator + translator framework produce ads reflecting higher values of psychological attributes associated with a user action, including higher valence and arousal, and more calls to action. In contrast, levels of these attributes in ads produced by the generator model alone are similar to those of human-authored ads. Our results demonstrate the ability to automatically generate useful advertisements for the health domain. We believe that our work offers health authorities an improved ability to build effective public health advertising campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predicting the click-through rate of an advertisement is a critical component of online advertising platforms. In sponsored search, the click-through rate estimates the probability that a displayed advertisement is clicked by a user after she submits a query to the search engine. Commercial search engines typically rely on machine learning models trained with a large number of features to make such predictions. This inevitably requires a lot of engineering efforts to define, compute, and select the appropriate features. In this paper, we propose two novel approaches (one working at character level and the other working at word level) that use deep convolutional neural networks to predict the click-through rate of a query-advertisement pair. Specifically, the proposed architectures consider as input only the textual content appearing in a query-advertisement pair and the page position at which the advertisement appears on the search result page of the query, and produce as output a click-through rate prediction. By comparing the character-level model with the word-level model, we show that language representation can be learnt from scratch at character level when trained on enough data. Through extensive experiments using billions of query-advertisement pairs of a popular commercial search engine, we demonstrate that both approaches significantly outperform a baseline model built on well-selected text features and a state-of-the-art word2vec-based approach. We also show the importance of the position feature in the proposed approaches in improving the prediction accuracy. When combining the predictions of the deep models introduced in this study with the prediction of the model in production of the same commercial search engine, we significantly improve the accuracy and the calibration of the click-through rate prediction of the production system. We also show the potential of leveraging the CTR prediction of the proposed deep learning models for query-ad relevance modeling and query-ad matching tasks in sponsored search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A national sample of US advertising students participated in a study that included a test of their ability to differentiate between editorial and advertising content on a news website. Almost all of the students identified a standard banner promotion as an advertisement. More than one in five misidentified a journalist-bylined article as an advertisement, and about one in four did not classify a story prominently labeled 'sponsored content' as an advertisement. Open-ended explanations indicated source confusion around the terms 'sponsored content,' 'native advertising' and 'advertising.' Results are viewed within the theory and measurement of effects of disclosure on persuasive knowledge activation. Professional and ethical implications for publishers, researchers and educators are discussed, including a proposal for the establishment of a threshold for Native Advertising Origin Confusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to design an advertising model through social media in order to influence the customers’ willingness to use Parsian banking services. For this purpose, the data were collected using grounded theory and interviews. Snowball sampling strategy was elected and with the researchers conducted interviews with 18 experts. As this was a new research field, the researchers collected data through semi-structured interviews within an open process. To analyze the data, three-step systematic coding (open, axial and selective coding) was used. The categories were classified into 6 classes and formed the different components of the model. The first component of this model was marketing leadership selected as the casual condition, and this causal condition was the underlying force for the next factor, namely the lack of customer. The next factor includes E-banking capabilities, customer-oriented and virtual advertising defined as research strategies. Other components include intervening conditions such as technical factors and advertising methods (relationship quality as context factor). The last component includes loyalty factors such as customer trust and performance, cooperative and competitive advantage which are the consequence of the implementation of this model.

Excessive online advertising and the advent of its new media and formats, challenge the understanding of how to use them effectively in order to break the clutter. This study adopts a model that evaluates the effectiveness factors of the advertising in two online media – social networks and search engines – from the consumer's perspective, namely how they perceive and assess advertising. A cross-sectional study was conducted based on an online questionnaire with a sample of 406 individuals. The results demonstrate that the consumers measure the value of advertising in social media based on perceived informativeness and entertainment, and in search engines on perceived informativeness and interactivity. In addition, perceived credibility has a more important role within social networks, and perceived irritation is processed differently in the two media. In turn, the mediating role of the perceived value in the relationship between determinants and attitude varies between the media. This study brings to light the effectiveness factors of online advertising, highlighting the moderating role that media play in the consumers response to advertising. Moreover, it provides important insights about the way companies should adapt their advertising messages to meet consumers' expectations in a web environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Goal-based categories have recently emerged as an alternative perspective to the dominant account of prototypical market categories. However, key questions remain regarding the mechanisms that would enable stable market exchanges to form around ad hoc and idiosyncratic goal-based categories. Thus, we sought to answer the following question: How can goal-based categorization enable stable market transactions? Through an inductive study drawing on industry discourse, participant observation, and interview data from the online advertising industry, we describe the category infrastructure that enables buyers and sellers to engage in market exchanges using goal-based categorization. Three mechanisms are integral to goal-based categorization in market exchanges: dimensioning (establishing a possibility space in which valuation can take place through the identification, addition, and/or deletion of product features), scoping (selecting particular features in the possibility space), and bracketing (excluding certain actors from participating in market transactions). Moreover, the fundamental principle of valuation in goal-based categorization is goal-based attribution, which involves iteratively adding and deleting features to accommodate evolving goals. Our findings suggest novel directions for work on goal-based categorization as an important element of valuation in modern markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]