Old meets new: how researchers can use existing knowledge to explain advertising in new media

This is the third special issue presenting various papers from the International Conference on Research in Advertising (ICORIA). It contains a selection of eight papers from the 2017 ICORIA presentations that were delivered in Ghent, Belgium.

The conference presentations and the papers in this issue cover a wide range of topics. They also mirror the diversity of, and enormous changes that have occurred in, the advertising landscape since the emergence of the Internet. The predominant traditional advertising media, such as television, radio, newspapers and magazines, has lost importance, while online advertising (search and display ads, websites, e-mail, social and mobile media advertising) has increased at a staggering rate. It is estimated that advertisers will spend US$240 billion on online advertising worldwide in 2019, which would equal 36% of the global advertising industry expenditure (PricewaterhouseCoopers 2016).

While new advertising media increases advertisers’ opportunities to communicate with consumers, it also challenges researchers who seek to understand not only how advertising works but also how it affects consumers. Advertising research provides a rich set of theories and concepts that has helped researchers to explain the effects of the traditional advertising media on consumers; however, the question is whether researchers can use these theories and concepts to explain how advertising works in the digital age. Are the existing theories and concepts still useful in an advertising world that mixes and matches different types of media? Does online advertising lead to a paradigm shift, thereby rendering the extant knowledge of advertising incommensurable?

To understand the usefulness of the existing knowledge in today’s advertising landscape, researchers must first examine the major differences between online and traditional advertising media and determine whether and how these differences affect the value of existing advertising theories and concepts.

Differences between online and traditional advertising media

The online and offline worlds differ along many dimensions (e.g. technological, financial, social and cultural). However, the differences that are relevant to understanding how the various advertising media operate are related to a few major dimensions.

• Interaction and user activity: The traditional advertising media audience is typically passive, and there are few opportunities for interaction (e.g. callback options in print or television ads), while the online advertising media often offers a high degree of interactivity (e.g. advergames) (Courbet et al. 2016). The traditional, passive advertising audience becomes a group of active users in the online world (Ha and McCann 2008) because consumers often actively seek information from the Internet. While the traditional advertising media is typically pushed onto the consumer, the Internet is both a push and a pull advertising medium. Furthermore, consumers not only interact with marketers on the Internet but also connect, interact and share with other consumers.

• Flexibility: With the rapid uptake of smartphones, online advertising has become available to users at any time and almost any place. Online advertising is up to date and changes quickly, and responses can occur in real time; moreover, for the most part, online advertising media is better able to adjust to new circumstances and sudden changes in the environment than traditional advertising media.

• Personalization, targeting and reach: With few exceptions (e.g. direct marketing), traditional advertising media uses a one-to-many distribution process whereby the same message is directed at all consumers. In contrast, online advertising media possesses a one-to-one advertising capability, thereby allowing each consumer to be addressed personally. Personalized online advertising can be narrowly targeted, while the wide-reaching strategy that is typically adopted in traditional advertising media usually results in wastage. However, narrow targeting is often at odds with the ability to reach large audiences.

• Measurability: Consumer responses are direct and easy to measure in the online world because all behavioural data are tracked, while responses to traditional media are often merely approximates (Danaher 2017). The advantage of the measurability of and data tracking in online advertising media comes at a price, because consumers are concerned about the transparency of data and the protection of privacy.

• Credibility versus control: Paid media (e.g. television ads) has less credibility than earned media (e.g. electronic word of mouth), but the content of the former is always under the control of the advertiser, while that of the latter is user created and can benefit or harm the brand and the advertiser.

• Cost and efficiency: The online advertising media has been celebrated as a cheaper and more efficient alternative to the expensive traditional advertising media. However, the literature offers mixed insights into the cost and efficiency of advertising media. For instance, click-through rates dwindled dramatically from 5% in the early 2000s to less than 0.1% within a decade (Lambrecht and Tucker 2013). Few studies have shown social media advertising to be effective (Danaher 2017). Hence, the overall and relative effectiveness of online advertising media compared to traditional media remains an open question.

Due to these differences, various advertising media relate to different stages of the consumer’s decision journey and, thus, contribute to diverse communication outcomes (Batra and Keller 2016). For instance, television or search advertising creates awareness and is important in the early phase of the decision journey, while social media is more important in the late stage of the consumer decision journey, which is when consumers interact with others and advocate a product.

The differences between advertising media are often gradual. The increasing integration of different advertising media, media mixes and crossover effects further indicates that the divide between traditional and online media is becoming increasingly obsolete as we enter a ‘post-digital’ advertising world, because the borders between most advertising media have become blurred. Moreover, most advertising media today have some kind of digital aspect. Nevertheless, the world of the traditional advertising media is not dead: for instance, the expenditure for outdoor advertising has increased significantly (Taylor, Franke, and Bang 2016), which is not surprising considering that billboards cannot be avoided by zapping nor by using ad blockers.

Using existing theories to explain phenomena in new advertising media

If researchers are interested in explaining a new phenomenon related to online advertising (e.g. multi-screening), they should start by reviewing the existing literature and attempting to determine whether the same or related phenomena (e.g. multitasking) have previously been investigated, particularly in relation to the traditional advertising media, and whether related concepts, explanations and theories exist. If they do exist, researchers should ascertain whether any of the aforementioned differences between advertising media relates to the new phenomenon compared to the phenomena examined in the extant literature. For instance, a phenomenon such as humour in advertising might suffer minimally from the differences between the online and traditional advertising media, while regarding word of mouth in the online world compared to the offline world, major differences exist in relation to interactivity and flexibility. The existing advertising knowledge can be related to digital phenomena in online advertising media in three ways (see Table 1):

Table 1. Three ways in which existing advertising knowledge can relate to digital advertising phenomena in online advertising media.

	Replication	Independence	Integration
Question	Does the digital phenomenon and its underlying explanations replicate an existing phenomenon in traditional advertising media?	Does the digital phenomenon operate in separate spheres and need new explanations?	Can the digital phenomenon be integrated into existing explanations; can online and traditional advertising media be merged within an integrated framework?
Empirical assessment	The explanatory power of a theoretical model in online and traditional advertising media is similar	The explanatory power of a theoretical model in online advertising media is non-significant	The explanatory power of a theoretical model in online and traditional advertising media is different
Recommendation	Apply the existing theory	Search for an alternative theory or develop a new one	Develop an integrative framework and use moderators to explain the differences between online and traditional advertising media

• Replication: The digital phenomenon and its underlying explanations replicate existing phenomena and explanations in traditional advertising media.

• Independence: The digital phenomenon operates in separate spheres and needs new explanations.

• Integration: The digital phenomenon can be integrated into existing explanations; phenomena in the online and traditional advertising media merge within an integrated framework.

The question of which one of the three relationships is applicable to a new digital phenomenon and whether and how an existing advertising theory is helpful in explaining the phenomenon can be assessed empirically by referring to the idea of generalizability and the explained variance of a theoretical model. The explained variance measures the merit of a scientific explanation, as well as the usefulness and relevance of a scientific theory (Aguinis et al. 2011). The more the variance in the dependent variable is explained, the more useful and relevant the underlying theory is thought to be. If an existing theoretical model that has been developed in the context of traditional advertising is applied to online advertising media and the explained variance remains the same, researchers are very likely dealing with replication. For instance, if researchers investigate the effect of humour in advertising on consumer responses and explain the effect using arousal theory, they might find similar effects (e.g. the same degree of explained variance) for both the online and traditional advertising media because the effect of humour in advertising is likely to be independent of the particular advertising medium. In such a case, a high degree of generalizability exists and researchers can assume that replication of an existing theory has occurred.

If the existing theoretical model does not explain any variance when applied to online advertising media, researchers are dealing with independence, and they need to find new explanations and theories regarding the respective phenomenon in online advertising media. If researchers are seeking alternative explanations, they can still refer to existing advertising theories, because the same finding can often be explained by different theories. If none of the existing theories has sufficient explanatory power, researchers need to develop new theories.

If the explained variance differs significantly between the online and traditional advertising media, researchers might be able to establish an integration approach, because either online or traditional advertising media might be merely a special case of an integrative framework. Researchers can use moderators to help explain the difference between online and traditional advertising media. These moderators are very likely related to the above dimensions that are used to differentiate between the online and offline advertising media. For instance, if advertising repetition works better (i.e. explains more variance in the dependent variable) online than in traditional media, prior explanations for repetition effects (e.g. two-factor theory, Berlyne 1970) can provide an integrative explanation. The differences between online and traditional advertising media in terms of the narrowness of their targeting can serve as a moderator that explains why repetition has greater explanatory power in online advertising media.

Papers in this issue

Of the papers submitted and presented at ICORIA in 2017, those with the highest reviewer scores were selected for this issue. The authors were invited to submit reworked and extended versions of their conference submissions to the International Journal of Advertising. Fourteen papers underwent the blind review process, of which eight were eventually selected for inclusion in the special issue, following successful revisions. These papers address a broad range of important and current topics in advertising research covering both traditional and online advertising, mix- and crossover studies, and general advertising concepts. Each paper makes a unique contribution to the literature.

The paper by Boerman, Van Reijmersdal, Rozendaal and Dima is devoted to developing a scale for a popular and important general concept in advertising research that applies to all types of advertising media: persuasion knowledge. The authors present a standardized measure to assess consumers’ persuasion knowledge of sponsored content that includes nine components. The contribution of the paper is important, as it provides a useful measure for advertising researchers.

De Bondt, Van Kerckhove and Geuens investigate why anthropomorphized product packages offer aesthetic appeal. When consumers observe a package that is shaped like an ideal body figure, they respond more favourably to it. The authors make an important contribution to the understanding of a traditional advertising instrument, as knowledge about packaging is limited.

Koinig, Diehl and Mueller explore the antecedents of consumers’ responses to pharmaceutical advertising and investigate how different levels of attitudes and skepticism are related. By extending existing theories, the authors provide new and interesting results related to advertising for over the counter drugs.

Rauwers, Remmelswaal, Van Noort, Fransen and Dahlén investigate the influence of traditional versus creative advertising media. Using shopping carts as the creative media, the authors find that the positive effect of creative advertising media can be explained by perceived humour and perceived value. By applying existing theories and concepts, the authors explain the effects of a new media format that adds to the set of existing traditional advertising media.

Malthouse, Maslowska and Franks provide an extensive discussion of the new era of computational television advertising. The authors suggest that coordinating delivery, advertising inventory and optimizing data are the key success factors of future television and television advertising. This conceptual paper is an impressive example of the development of a new framework for a traditional advertising medium that undergoes dramatic changes in this ear of digitalization.

Voorveld, Araujo, Bernritter, Rietberg and Vliegenthart investigate how ad spending in traditional advertising media drives consumers’ engagement with brands on social media. The authors illustrate that traditional advertising contributes to consumers’ online brand engagement, but advertising on social media is the major driver of ‘likes’. This paper makes a strong contribution to advertising knowledge by providing a crossover study that integrates traditional and online advertising media to explain a digital phenomenon.

Rauwers, Voorveld and Neijens study the influence of the interactivity of advertisements in digital magazines. They find that interactivity and surprise are the two processes that explain consumers’ favourable responses to interactive advertising in digital magazines. By using both existing and new process explanations, the paper provides previously unknown insights into a new phenomenon in an online advertising medium that emerged from a traditional medium.

Willemsen, Mazerant, Kamphuis and van der Veen investigate the effect that brand messages linked to timely events (i.e. real-time marketing) on social media have on consumer engagement. The authors find that real-time marketing is effective when it is original and meaningful. Using existing concepts and theories and combining these with research findings about online advertising, the authors are able to explain a quite new and relevant phenomenon in social media.

In conclusion, I wish to thank the authors who submitted manuscripts for publication consideration and the reviewers who contributed their expertise to improve the submissions. I also thank Ray Taylor for asking me to edit this special issue and for his trust and encouragement throughout the process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.