Journal of Interactive Marketing

The mobile environment of the 2020s is experiencing a vertical video revolution. The portrait, or vertical, screen format is replacing the traditional landscape, or horizontal, format to become the default for mobile video production and consumption. With the increasing use of vertical videos, an important, yet unanswered, question is how mobile users respond to this format. Therefore, we examine the effectiveness of mobile vertical versus horizontal video advertisements in terms of consumer interest, engagement, and processing fluency, as well as the underlying mechanism of the effort of watching the video ad on a smartphone in three studies. In a large-scale field study, we demonstrate that mobile vertical video ads increase consumer interest and engagement compared to horizontal video ads. In two experimental studies, we further show that mobile users process vertical video ads more fluently than horizontal video ads. Exploring the underlying mechanism for this effect, we find that mobile users experience less effort when watching a video ad vertically (vs. horizontally) on the smartphone in full-screen, as watching a vertical video does not require turning the phone. Importantly, we find that mobile users’ age moderates this indirect effect, as younger mobile users (Generation Z) process mobile vertical video ads more fluently than older Generations X and Y. This article closes with implications for theory and suggestions for mobile marketers.

Advertisers increasingly use personalized advertising that is tailored to consumers based on data concerning their preferences and behaviors, which is gained by collecting their personal information. The present study examines the role of consumer–brand relationships and social media platform contexts in effective personalized advertising. Consumers weigh the benefits of personalized brand information against forfeiting privacy by disclosing personal information. For the first time, a 2 (consumer–brand relationship: weaker/stronger) X 2 (data collection method: overt/covert) X 2 (platform: Facebook/Twitter) national online experiment was conducted to examine the personalization–privacy paradox in a social media context. The findings suggested that strong consumer–brand relationships affect the perceived value of information disclosure by bolstering the perceived benefits and mitigating perceived risks of disclosure whereas perceived risks dominated privacy calculus decisions when weak consumer–brand relationships were present. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Throughout a distribution channel, multiple sales platforms and technologies are leveraged to expand market reach and manage offering assortments. Yet, the literature is limited on how buyers who are channel intermediaries make purchase decisions across sales platforms particularly when platforms vary in their degree of technology enablement. This research investigates how B2B buyers respond to the offering, in terms of numerical assortment and quality, when the sales environments vary in their level of technology enablement. We examine the buyer's sales platform choice, purchase quantity, and tackle the seller's challenge of assortment integration. Buyers have a choice of purchasing from a low-tech platform where buyers are in-person and an auction determines sales, an Internet-enabled platform where remotely located buyers are price takers, and a hybrid platform that has a high level of technology enablement such that co-located and remotely located potential buyers simultaneously bid on the offering. A Hidden Markov Model captures the impact of different need states on buyers’ decisions. Our findings: (1) uncover three distinct buyer profiles that have unique sales platform preferences and multiplatform buying tendencies that relate to their comfort with technology-enabled markets, (2) show that buyers exhibit distinct and dynamic needs that affect their sales platform choices and response to the platform offerings, (3) reveal that buyers experience diminishing returns to product assortment and condition at varying rates depending on their need state. Supporting our key findings, we find evidence of similar behaviors among consumers in a B2C multichannel context that includes an omnichannel. Additionally, we offer recommendations for B2B sellers regarding allocating and adjusting assortments to drive sales platform choice and revenues per buyer.

Advergames are digital games through which advertisers promote their brands. While many studies have explored the influence of the gamification of advertising, little is known about the effects of important advergame attributes such as gaming platform (device used to play games) and game speed (overall pace of games) on consumers’ immediate and delayed memory, delayed attitude, and delayed intention to purchase the advertised brands. We address these gaps by conducting two experiments with fictitious brands (Study 1) and real brands that vary in the degree of familiarity (Study 2). Results reveal that a PC-based advergame generates better delayed memory than a mobile-based advergame, while gaming platform does not affect immediate memory. Also, it interacts with game speed only in the delayed situation. Brand familiarity moderates the effects of gaming platform and game speed on brand attitude and purchase intention in such a way that unfamiliar brands are more effective than familiar ones.

A carefully tailored tone in response to a complaint on social media can create positive emotions for an upset customer. However, very few studies have identified what response tones, based on an established theory, would be most effective for complaint management. This study conceptualizes a service agent's response tones based on Ballmer and Brennenstuhl's (1981) classification of speech acts and examines how an agent's use of speech acts elicit positive emotions for the complainant. Ballmer and Brennenstuhl classify speech acts within the dimensions of conventionality and dialogicality, and they suggest the two dimensions interact. Thus, we examine the impact of each dimension of speech acts and the interactions between the two dimensions on the elicitation of positive emotions for complainants. We collected over 100,000 tweets and classified firm agents’ speech acts and complainants’ emotions by designing deep learning architectures (i.e., bi-directional recurrent neural networks). Our fixed-effect regression results show that a low level of each speech act leads to the elicitation of customers’ positive emotions but that the combination of the two erodes the individual advantages. This study expands Ballmer and Brennenstuhl's (1981) speech act classification from a speaker's perspectives to a listener's perspectives by contextualizing it in an analysis of service agents’ tones and their roles in eliciting positive emotions among complainants.

Product reviews are critical high-scope non-marketing cues for consumers to obtain useful product information from various perspectives. However, the effects of inconsistent reviews among multiple sources on new product sales are underexplored. Based on the cue-diagnosticity framework, this research investigates how multi-source review inconsistency (MSRI) affects purchase intention and new product sales in the context of the U.S. automobile industry when firms signal product quality through advertising as a low-scope cue. Using multi-methods of an experiment and secondary data analysis, the results show the negative effects of MSRI on purchase intention and new product sales and explain the mechanisms through information diagnosticity. Further, the findings show how advertising as a low-scope cue can mitigate the effect of multi-source inconsistency on new product sales.

Although marketers have been using various message tactics to breathe life into their brands, the concepts of animism and animistic cues, particularly in social media marketing, have received little theoretical and empirical attention. Therefore, we conducted two studies to uncover what drives animistic thinking on social media, how animism is linked to anthropomorphism, how animism can benefit brands online, and what the boundary conditions for this phenomenon are. The findings demonstrate that animistic (vs. non-animistic) cues elicit animistic thinking, which leads to more favorable brand evaluations. This effect is moderated by superstitious beliefs. The results provide new knowledge for both marketing researchers and practitioners, revealing that it is easier to activate animism than anthropomorphism on social media and that such activation can be done via easily devisable cues (such as simple movement), particularly when addressing highly superstitious consumers.

Triggered emails are personalized messages that are automatically sent as a response to specific actions or states of customers. Typical examples of this type of campaign include cross-selling recommendations, cart abandonment reminders, and re-engagement emails. Despite the widespread growth of these strategies, there has been no formal evaluation of their effectiveness. This paper investigates the impact of one type of triggered email campaign by using an experimental approach. We identify customers who had recently browsed the website of a multichannel retailer but had abandoned the process before making a purchase. Approximately half of the sample was randomly selected to receive automated emails with different configurations, while the other half receive no message at all. Comparison of the sales of these two groups indicates that browse abandonment emails have increase revenues in the online channel and in the triggered category. In terms of the design of the campaign, we found that the implementation of triggered emails plays an important role in their effectiveness. In this regard our result indicates that retargeting based on longer navigation histories is associated with larger conversions and that recommendations of wider assortments are associated with larger revenues.