Special Issue Introduction: Digital Engagement with Advertising

The topic of digital engagement has received much attention in recent years but digital engagement and advertising has previously never been treated as a special issue topic in leading journals in the field. The purpose of this special issue of Journal of Advertising on “Digital Engagement with Advertising” is to extend current understanding of consumers' digital engagement with advertising as a unique form of branded content.

Digital engagement has become a buzz phrase and there is little consensus on how to define it. In marketing, digital engagement has often been addressed in terms of service-dominant logic or value co-creation, and there are numerous attempts to conceptualize and empirically examine these concepts (Brodie et al. 2011; Vargo and Lusch 2004). In this special issue, digital engagement with advertising is broadly defined in terms of consumers' interactions with a brand to strengthen emotional, psychological, or physical investments (Chaffey 2007).

In these articles, digital advertising is generally defined as being one of a variety of forms of “branded content,” for example, branded mobile apps, any branded content that appears in social media contexts, and messages from companies in the form of blogs, tweets, Facebook posts, etc. In some cases, comments that consumers make about brands in digital contexts are considered “advertising” in the sense that these comments are essentially content relevant to a brand (Rodgers and Thorson 2017).

The definitions of “digital engagement with advertising” also vary, although there are among these definitions important common themes. We look at these definitions from our authors individually and then comment briefly on some common themes. As will be seen, the definitional differences result from the fact that in the digital environment there are so many kinds of channels in which branded content can appear, and that content itself can take so many forms.

Baek and Yoo define engagement in terms of the amount of use a branded app receives and how positively people evaluate it on a number of attributes like “personalization,” “speed,” and “fun.” Thus, engagement here includes both behavior (use) and attitudes (evaluation on the attributes). Both types of measures are theorized as antecedents to behaviors like continuing use of the app and recommending it to others, as well as to verbally report that there is an intention to remain committed to the brand. Interestingly, the operationalization of engagement is equated to what others (e.g., Hoehle and Venkatesh 2015) defined as “usability.” Under this conceptualization, engagement is not a feature of usability, but is equivalent to it. They theorize that the engagement measures influence brand loyalty, which they defined with a scale mainly indexing intent to buy the brand again.

Gavilanes, Flatten, and Brettel first distinguish two kinds of social media advertising: explicit (banner ads) and implicit (e.g., fan pages or tweets from the company). They employ a broad definition of social media including such sites as Facebook and Instagram, but also blogs, video communities, and dating platforms. For them, engagement is defined in terms of a hierarchy of levels from lower to higher, i.e., neutral consumption, positive filtering, cognitive and affective processing, and advocacy (highest level). They theorize that social network advertising is an antecedent to consumer engagement, which in turn leads to advertising effectiveness. Specifically, they content analyzed a single company's types of social network advertising, identifying such categories as product display, infotainment posts, and posts requesting product feedback. As theorized, the different types of content differentially predicted responses in the four levels of engagement.

Seo, Li, Choi, and Yoon explore how narrative attributes of digital ads are related to engagement. They theorize that engagement with narratives results from a combination of sender, receiver, and advertising message effects. The authors suggest that narratives create engagement, likely by a combination of the effects of empathetic processing, mental simulation of the narrative's reality, and identification with ad characters. The engagement created by narratives is theorized to lead to more sharing of advertisements, as moderated by whether the sharing is with friends or the general public.

Pentina, Guilloux, and Micu define engagement (similar to Kahn 1990) as an expression of a consumer's cognitive and emotional attitudes via their brand-related engagement behaviors in social media. The observed behaviors are posited to be consequences of engagement. Engagement is indexed in terms of 11 levels of behaviors that consumers report doing in response to high-cost, status products advertising messages on social media.

Yoon, Li, Ji, North, Hong, and Liu, like De Langhe, Fernbach, and Lichtenstein (2016), conceptualize engagement as behavior, and as being different from and requiring more effort than either involvement or brand commitment. For the authors, the behavior of commenting on a brand message online is a high-effort response to brands and the occurrence of this type of engagement is therefore theorized to have a greater effect on such subsequent processes as purchase decisions.

Voorveld, van Noort, Muntinga, and Bronner focus on how engagement is a multidimensional psychological experience that differs qualitatively and quantitatively as a function of use of social media as such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+, Snapchat, Instagram, and Pinterest. Engagement, uniquely, for each of these social media is a multidimensional profile of experience along dimensions like innovation, social interaction, empowerment, practical use, stimulation, and pastime. Indeed, the combination of 11 identified dimensions of experience is considered, both in terms of whether they are experienced or not, and to what degree they are experienced as “engagement.” The authors theorize that these dimensional profiles of psychological experience for each type of social media are antecedents to how ads embedded in those media are experienced.

As can be seen, exact definitions of digital engagement with advertising vary in terms of whether the engagement is cognitive, affective, behavioral, or some combination. In most of these studies, engagement in branded messages is strongly related to engagement in the digital context or platform, or vice versa. Indeed, engagement with advertising in itself is found to be key to explaining how digital engagement is related to advertising responses (see in this issue Voorveld et al.).

Some common themes across the special issue studies include: 1) digital engagement with advertising is located in the consumer-brand interaction; 2) digital engagement with advertising has many dimensions, and dimensions have key quantitative (e.g., volume, intensity) and qualitative (e.g., valence) differences; 3) digital engagement is both an antecedent and a consequence in explaining responses to advertising; 4) successful engagement depends on attributes of the branded content, context, and/or individual experience; and, 5) digital engagement differs from related concepts, such as involvement or personal relevance and commitment.

One of the most important contributions of the studies in this special issue is their diverse and creative measures of engagement, and their success in showing that these measures are significantly predictive of subsequent behavioral intention and consumption of brands. The power of digitally based branded content messages is clearly supported by these studies, and likely explains the continued abandonment of advertising from purchased media.

Subsequently, many of the strategies and tactics of advertising presented in the special issue articles represent fundamental shifts in how brand-related information is created, co-created, and distributed among consumers, brands, and brand stakeholders; consumers play an active role in shaping the meaning of and circulating advertising in social networks (see Thorson and Rodgers 2017). The result is that brand messages and digital contexts (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, brand sites, YouTube, etc.) that people choose to engage with are much more complex: sometimes these contexts operate alone, and sometimes these contexts work in tandem with other factors, such as branded content or user motivations, to influence digital engagement and advertising evaluations.

Because no other journal has had a special issue on digital engagement devoted solely to advertising, we were optimistic that many quality manuscripts would be submitted to this special issue and, in fact, our expectations were exceeded. A total of 55 manuscripts were submitted and competitively reviewed, and six manuscripts were ultimately selected for this special issue. In addition to the various definitions presented above, the six articles are authored by a diversity of researchers from different countries, spanning a range of topics, and using a variety of theories, concepts, and methods.

The lead article, “Content Strategies for Digital Consumer Engagement in Social Networks: Why Advertising Is an Antecedent of Engagement” by José Manuel Gavilanes, Tessa Christina Flatten, and Malte Brettel, addresses a critically important question regarding the role that digital advertising elements play in a social media strategy. Specifically, the authors identify seven content categories for social network advertising and a four-level model for digital consumer engagement based on consumers' intermediate mindset responses. Their results show a significant but unequal influence of four of the digital advertising categories digital consumer engagement in social networks, and confirm intermediate responses to digital advertising using real market data based on Facebook metrics.

In the next article, “Attracting Comments: Digital Engagement Metrics on Facebook and Financial Performance,” Gunwoo Yoon, Cong Li, Yi (Grace) Ji, Michael North, Cheng Hong, and Jiangmeng Liu use big data to undertake the challenge of calculating the ROI of digital engagement with advertising. They do so with macro-level data clustering using Facebook as a social network context by connecting more than 24 million consumer Facebook posts to S&P 500 companies' revenue over a five-year time period. Their results challenge traditional ROI approaches by demonstrating that the number (volume) and tone (valence) of consumer comments on a company's Facebook post can have significant and positive effects on company revenue.

The next three articles examine how consumer digital engagement varies with advertising depending on the social media platform, and how social media platform and advertising can operate separately and/or together to influence evaluations of advertising. In their article, “Engagement with Social Media and Social Media Advertising: The Differentiating Role of Platform Type,” Hilde A. M. Voorveld, Guda van Noort, Daniël G. Muntinga, and Fred Bonner conduct a survey of 1,346 social media users aged 13+ and map user engagement experiences on eight different social media platforms. They connect consumers' digital engagement experiences with evaluations of advertising appearing on the eight social media platforms. Their results demonstrate that digital engagement and advertising evaluations are sometimes contingent on, and sometimes not contingent on, the social media platform in which the advertising appears, suggesting that social media should not be considered an umbrella concept, as this disregards key qualitative differences afforded by different digital platforms.

Next, Iryna Pentina, and Véronique Guilloux, and Anca Cristina Micu author “Exploring Social Media Engagement Behaviors in the Context of Luxury Brands,” and identify and characterize 11 different social media engagement behaviors based on depth interviews with luxury shoppers in Paris. The authors define brand engagement in terms of co-creation, arguing that digital brand engagement is a shared and negotiated process between brands and brand stakeholders. Using brand-related discourse analysis, the authors develop a conceptual matrix involving different types of audiences and different levels of engagement effort and creativity exerted by these audiences, resulting in a conceptual mapping of complex consumer motivations for online content creation with complex motivational combinations of specific engagement behaviors.

Mobile device use accounts for 65% of all digital time (ComScore 2016), so it is fitting that our next authors present a valid and reliable scale on branded app usability as an important antecedent to enduring, longer-term consumer engagement with branded mobile platforms. Taking a consumer-centric approach, Tae Hyun Baek and Chan Yun Yoo, in “Branded App Usability: Conceptualization, Measurement, and Prediction of Consumer Loyalty, provide the results of a 13-item, five factor scale of branded app usability, and relate perceived levels of branded app usability to marketing outcomes. Their results have important theoretical and practical implications for developing branded app engagement strategies in mobile devices that should prove beneficial to both advertising scholars and practitioners alike.

Finally, “Narrative Transportation and Paratextual Features of Social Media in Viral Advertising” by Yuri Seo, Xiaozhu Li, Yung Kyun Choi, and Sukki Yoon take on perhaps one of the most challenging issues facing digital marketers, i.e., identifying factors that boost digital advertising's ability to go viral. Informed by narrative transportation theory, the results of two experiments in South Korea and China reveal that the experience of narrative transportation has a positive influence on viral advertising but that the relative strength of this relationship depends on boundary conditions associated with information about the sender, advertiser, and/or message appearing on social media. The authors present compelling results of how persuasion knowledge resulting from advertising disclosure can improve the narrative transportation experience by associating digital advertisements with a higher numbers of “likes”, thereby increasing social proof of viral advertising.

Combined, these six articles comprise the special issue of Journal of Advertising “Digital Engagement with Advertising” and provide what we believe is a unique contribution to the advertising field and related areas, which should benefit virtually anyone wanting to advance theory and/or practice of digital engagement with advertising.