A qualitative study was conducted to explore Chinese advertising practitioners’ perceptions and interpretations of engagement in the digital era. Twenty-three in-depth interviews were conducted to collect data. Findings revealed that Chinese advertising practitioners emphasize interactive experience in defining engagement, which acknowledges multiple dimensions of engagement; they believe that the execution of engagement should emphasize content creation, media selection, and proper interaction; they tend to discuss engagement in a very holistic way, while they consider the effort versus effect dual-approach as an appropriate criterion to measure engagement, confusions, and discrepancies exist surrounding the engagement measurement among Chinese advertising practitioners. The current study offers insightful implications for the conceptualization of engagement in different cultural contexts as well as on how to bridge the perceptional gap between academia and industry regarding the execution of engagement.
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