Facilitator or Inhibitor? The Use of 360-Degree Videos for Immersive Brand Storytelling

ABSTRACT

This study compares a 360-degree narrative video ad with a standard narrative video ad in terms of transportation, ad usefulness, emotional responses, ad attitudes, and brand attitudes. Hypotheses are proposed based on the narrative transportation and the limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing (LC4MP) theoretical frameworks and tested using an experimental method. Results demonstrate that the difference in ad effectiveness between a 360-degree narrative video and a standard narrative video becomes significant under the condition that the role of perceived ease of navigation is considered. In particular, a 360-degree narrative video ad outperforms a standard narrative video ad when viewers navigate smoothly, use visual and/or auditory cues to enhance the viewing experience, clearly know where the desired point of view originates, and have control of the viewing direction.

KEYWORDS:

• 360-degree video advertising
• narrative advertising
• navigation
• transportation
• cognitive overload

Note

Notes

1. Because the four items that were adapted to measure perceived ease of navigation were based on respondents' thoughts regarding the 360-degree ad in a pretest and discussion in a report from IAB (2016) and Craig, Sherman, and Will's (2009) research, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted to establish convergent validity of the measurement. We first checked the normality assumption, and all skewness and kurtosis values associated with each item were within the range of ±1.96 (Ghasemi and Zahediasl 2012). Then, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and the four items were initially converged into one component, explaining 52.56% of total variance. Also, all factor loadings were above .68. We then conducted CFA, and results indicated a good model fit, χ² (df = 2) = 4.17, p = .12, GFI = .98, CFI = .98, NFI = .97, RMSEA = .10, PCLOSE = .19. Moreover, we tested convergent validity through examining the path coefficients from the latent construct to their corresponding manifest indicators. As indicated by the results of CFA, all factor loadings for the latent construct were satisfactory (Table 3).