Untapped and Understudied Issues in Influencer Advertising

Guest Editors:

Chen Lou, Assistant Professor, Nanyang Technological University

Venus Jin, Professor, Northwestern University in Qatar

Scholarly research on influencer advertising has grown explosively over the past few years. Vloggers, YouTubers, Instafamous, or bloggers, all describe social media influencers who create valuable content and/or narrate their personal lives on social media platforms to connect with followers and thus attract sponsorships from brands (e.g., Jin, Muqaddam, and Ryu 2019; Lou and Yuan 2019). Influencer advertising is quintessentially interactive, which relies heavily on the bond between influencers and followers and capitalizes on the persuasive appeal of influencers. As an evolving form of interactive advertising, influencer advertising serves as a new means for brands to efficiently ramp up return-on-investment, especially during the pandemic (Taylor 2020).

Extant research on influencer advertising has paid due attention to the role of sponsorship disclosure (e.g., Evans et al. 2017), the impact of AI influencers (Thomas and Fowler 2021), the appeal of influencers among children (Boerman and van Reijmersdal 2020), influencer-follower relationship (Lou 2021), and the effect of consumers' characteristics (e.g., social comparison tendency, compulsive buying tendency, and materialistic envy) (Jin and Ryu 2020). Recent review articles have also summarized the current themes in influencer advertising and bibliometric analysis for practical implications (e.g., Hudders, De Jans, and De Veirman 2021; Ye et al. 2021). Yet, there are still untapped or understudied issues in influencer advertising pertaining to the broad context of interactive advertising, for instance, analysis from the perspectives of influencers and/or advertising agencies, the impact of influencers in promoting prosocial behavior (e.g., mask wearing during the pandemic, getting vaccines), the effect of virtual influencers, pet influencers, children influencers, and so on. Therefore, we invite original manuscripts for this upcoming Special Issue Article Collection of the Journal of Interactive Advertising (JIA) dedicated to Influencer Advertising, within the broader domain of interactive advertising.

Relevant topics and themes for the Special Issue Article Collection might include, but are not limited to:

• The bright vs. dark side of influencer advertising

• Analysis from the perspective of influencers and/or agencies

• Prosocial influencer advertising and health marketing campaigns (e.g., charity, climate change, vaccination, anti-drug, anti-smoking, (anti-)vaping, healthy diet campaigns, etc.)

• The role of influencers in pressing social, political, and global issues (e.g., me too movement, racism, BLM, human right issues, activism, etc.)

• The appeal of influencers in a broad range of underexplored domains, (e.g., health, education, religion, politics, entrepreneurship, etc.)

• Related ethical issues (e.g., side effects of sponsorship, dark side of parasocial interaction such as privacy invasion, and harassment via direct messaging [DM], and unrealistic expectation for influencers’ ethical standards, etc.)

• Virtual influencers, AI-based machine-based algorithm

• Research on understudied platforms, such as TikTok, Twitch, and Clubhouse

• Twitch game influencers (product placement, brand placement, and sponsored ads)

• Petfluencers

• Children influencers (e.g., ethical issues related to minors and policy implications)

Submission Deadline: April 30, 2022. (Check JIA’s website for any updates.)

Publication Schedule: Accepted articles for this Special Issue Article Collection will be published in JIA’s first available regular issue (i.e., rolling publication); the articles will also be added to a Special Article Collection page, along with an introduction and editorial from the guest editors upon completion of the collection.