Interactive ads: Effectiveness of advertising production in consumer evaluations

Abstract

The effectiveness of advertisements to generate good reception and positive evaluations of brands is desired by marketers. For this purpose, they modify the format and/or content of ads in hopes that they become attractive. However, many modifications do not produce effects on consumers, making the effort worthless. With new media technologies, the effectiveness of changing static to interactive format is a central issue for the success of advertisers. Thus, the research investigated the effectiveness of static and interactive advertisements to produce attitudinal evaluations of the ad, brand and purchase intention of consumers. We conducted an experiment within and between subjects, taking interactivity as the manipulated variable and the attitudes and purchase intention as dependent endogenous variables. Static and interactive ads were produced for new brands created to eliminate spurious effects of familiarity with the brand and to obtain purity in the effect of interactivity. Through the use of a structural model, the results show that interactivity generated direct effect only on the attitude toward the ad in the dimension “evaluation of the ad characteristic” and “involvement capability of the ad”, and indirectly on the brand’s attractiveness (a dimension of the attitude toward the brand) and the purchase intention. The research contributes to the clarification of ad effectiveness in new technologies of high quality media that require proactive activities of consumers.

Keywords: interactive advertisement, effectiveness, attitude, experiment, consumers.