Determinants of consumers’ attitudes towards digital advertising – A meta-analytic comparison across time and touchpoints

Highlights

• Informativeness, entertainment, irritation and credibility drive attitude towards touchpoints.

• Effect of irritation has diminished over the last twenty years.

• Effects are stronger for email advertising than for other online touchpoints.

• Credibility is equally relevant across all touchpoints.

• Personalization, privacy concerns, and interactivity are newer drivers and add to established ones.

Abstract

By means of a meta-analysis, we synthesize the findings of over two decades of research from 88 empirical studies regarding four well established and theoretically rooted determinants on consumers’ attitude towards digital advertising: informativeness, entertainment, irritation, and credibility. Among other findings, we show that the effects of these determinants have changed over the past 20 years as the internet has developed. We also find that the effects differ depending on which type of online touchpoint was considered. In particular, we differentiate between the most prominent online touchpoints: email advertising, social media advertising, search engine advertising, web display banner advertising, electronic word-of-mouth communication, and corporate website advertising. Additionally, we extend the well-established determinants by more recent ones accounting for the ongoing digitalization and advances in online touchpoints (i.e. personalization, privacy concerns and interactivity). We also derive important managerial implications and several fundamental directions for future research.

Introduction

With the evolution of the internet and ongoing digitalization, advertising activities have increasingly shifted towards digital advertising (Gordon et al., 2021). Firms now interact and communicate with consumers through a wide range of online touchpoints (Herhausen, Kleinlercher, Verhoef, Emrich, & Rudolph, 2019), such as display banners, social media ads, e-mail campaigns, websites, or search engine ads. However, the proliferation of online touchpoints presents firms with the major challenge of designing digital advertising at these touchpoints in such a way that consumers perceive it as positively as possible (Kuehnl et al., 2019, Lemon and Verhoef, 2016, Wagner et al., 2020).

In recognition of the managerial need to identify and understand key design factors of online touchpoints, a vibrant body of research has developed over the years. Researchers have actively studied the determinants of consumer attitudes towards a wide range of online touchpoints (e.g., Chen and Wells, 1999, Eid et al., 2020, Gvili and Levy, 2016, Luo, 2002, Mukherjee and Banerjee, 2019, Ruiz-Mafe et al., 2014, Sun et al., 2010, Wiese et al., 2020). Most of these studies are based explicitly or implicitly on the advertising value model (Brackett and Carr, 2001, Ducoffe, 1996). While many of these studies find empirical support for the four key determinants of this model—informativeness, entertainment, irritation, and credibility—notable differences occur across studies, including important limitations to the conclusions of each individual study. First, the studies are based almost exclusively on cross-sectional investigations of consumers at a given point in time. However, digital advertising research has been around for more than 20 years (Moe & Schweidel, 2014), and each study represents only one specific snapshot within a long time period in which the internet and consumers’ internet behavior have changed significantly (Carbonell et al., 2018, Hunsaker and Hargittai, 2018). A reasonable assumption is that internet-savvy consumers today react differently to digital advertising than they did 10 or 20 years ago. For example, increasing exposure to digital advertising may have accustomed consumers to certain forms and features of online touchpoints (Bortko et al., 2019, Vance et al., 2018). Therefore, whether and to what extent the effects of a given determinant have changed over time remain unknown.

Second, the individual studies usually look at a specific online touchpoint. However, the internet offers a vast range of touchpoints that firms use to interact and communicate with consumers (Kannan, 2017). These online touchpoints differ in their structural design and their functions within a consumer’s decision process (Burns & Lutz, 2006). For example, consumers tend to use search engine advertising primarily when they search for information in their decision journey (Lu & Zhao, 2014), while they tend to use social media ads throughout the entire journey (Mukherjee & Banerjee, 2017).

Third, given the ongoing digitalization and advancements in internet technologies, online touchpoints have also been subject to changes or advancements over time (Shah, Engineer, Bhagat, Chauhan, & Shah, 2020). For example, while online touchpoints such as display banners, websites, and e-mail ads were static in the early days of the internet, today these touchpoints can be personalized to the needs of individual consumers (Bleier and Eisenbeiss, 2015a, Lambrecht and Tucker, 2013, Sahni et al., 2018). To account for these advances, researchers have proposed and studied new determinants beyond the established ones from the advertising value model (Alsamydai and Khasawneh, 2013, Chu and Yuan, 2013, Lin and Kim, 2016, Van Noort et al., 2012). Therefore, a next important step is to identify which of these new determinants are particularly relevant in the context of technologically evolved online touchpoints and thus complement the established determinants of the advertising value model.

In light of the extensive stream of empirical research with differing study designs and results, the objective of this meta-analytic study is to obtain empirical generalizations by integrating the findings on the determinants of consumer attitudes towards online touchpoints while explicitly accounting for the aforementioned study differences. We review research spanning two decades and integrate 88 empirical studies following meta-analytic recommendations (Eisend, 2017, Paul and Criado, 2020). Thereby, we contribute to the literature in four ways. First, we assess the relative importance of the four established determinants of the advertising value model (informativeness, entertainment, irritation, and credibility) on consumer attitudes. Second, we propose and test an extended version of the advertising value model by integrating the effects of “new” determinants related to technological advancements of online touchpoints. These two contributions allow us to conclude which aspects firms need to pay particular attention to when managing online touchpoints. Third, we address temporal changes in the impact of the four established determinants. Thus, this meta-analysis examines whether and how the effects of these determinants have changed over the past 20 years. Fourth, we examine whether the effects of the established determinants differ across online touchpoints, whereas previous reviews focus on a single touchpoint (e.g., Kudeshia and Kumar, 2017, Maseeh et al., 2021) or on one or a few determinants (e.g., Chakrabarty and Yelkur, 2006, Sarkar et al., 2020).

In the next section, we outline our conceptual framework. We then describe the data collection procedure and analysis methods. Next, we present the meta-analytic findings. Finally, in the discussion section, we use the generalizations to provide important practical implications and to develop a future research agenda for studying consumers’ attitude towards digital advertising.