Untapped and Understudied Issues in Influencer Advertising
The topic of influencer advertising has seen significant growth in academic interest and industry spending in recent years. One of the earliest JIA articles to directly study influencer marketing is Chen Lou and Shupei Yuan’s 2019 article, 'Influencer Marketing: How Message Value and Credibility Affect Consumer Trust of Branded Content on Social Media.' Notably, as of this writing, this article is the most viewed (154,716 views) and cited (713 CrossRef citations) in the history of JIA. The salience of influencer advertising as a research topic is also evidenced by its popularity among the top 10 most-read articles: four out of ten (40%) most-read JIA articles studied influencer advertising.
Due to the dramatic increase in academic and industry attention to influencer advertising, I invited Chen Lou of Nanyang Technological University and S. Venus Jin at Northwestern University Qatar to collaborate on creating and running a special issue on influencer advertising focusing on untapped and understudied issues in influencer advertising. For the past three years since its launch as JIA’s first Special Issue Article Collection (SIAC), JIA has received numerous manuscripts for the SIAC, of which only 15 articles have been published.
The collection showcases diverse approaches and insights on scientific inquiries into how and why influencer advertising works. As Chen and Venus’s editorial explains, the articles explore the roles of influencers, messages, and media in the advertising process as main or boundary factors.
The findings across these articles demonstrate the excellent work and evolving trends in the study of influencer advertising. I anticipate that this SIAC will provide valuable conceptual bases and appropriate theoretical frameworks that will advance future research on influencer advertising from various perspectives amidst the ever-changing digital media landscape.
Edited by
Chen Lou(Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
S. Venus Jin(Northwestern University in Qatar, Qatar)
Jooyoung Kim(JIA Editor-in-Chief, University of Georgia, USA)