Exploring strategies to promote health services online: The role of contextual priming, digital ad type, and health threat orientation in determining the effectiveness of health service ads

Abstract

Contextual congruence, health threat orientation, and digital advertisement type can influence the effectiveness of online health service ads. To examine these effects, a 2 × 2 × 2 online experiment was conducted with contextual similarity as a within-subjects factor. Results suggest that contextual similarity was positively associated with both attitude toward ads and purchase intention. The data also revealed an interaction effect between digital advertising type and health threat orientation: health ads to address issues of immediate concerns enhanced purchase intention, but only in the incongruent context. Implications of the study were also discussed.

Keywords:

• Advertising type
• contextual similarity
• health threat orientation

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Notes

1 We did not use more common disease such as regular flu as the proximal issue due to the imbalance in familiarity with the issues (college students would be more knowledgeable of regular flu than colon cancer) and the associated hazard (colon cancer is more severe than regular flu).