یک مطالعه تجربی از رابطه بین تعهد آنلاین و اثربخشی تبلیغات

We discuss consumer engagement with a website, provide a systematic approach to examining the types of engagement produced by specific experiences, and show that engagement with the media context increases advertising effectiveness. Based on experiments using measurement scales involving eight different online experiences, we advance two types of engagement with online media — Personal and Social-Interactive Engagement. Our results show that both types are positively associated with advertising effectiveness. Moreover, Social-Interactive Engagement, which is more uniquely characteristic of the web as a medium, is shown to affect advertising after controlling for Personal Engagement. Our results offer online companies and advertisers new metrics and advertising strategies.

Media provide a context for advertising that may affect consumer responses to advertising. Many studies have investigated possible media context effects. The most general conclusion is that when consumers are highly “engaged” with a media vehicle they can be more responsive to advertising (e.g., Aaker and Brown, 1972, Bronner and Neijens, 2006, Coulter, 1998, Cunningham et al., 2006, DePelsmacker et al., 2002, Feltham and Arnold, 1994, Gallagher et al., 2001, Nicovich, 2005 and Wang, 2006). While this conclusion is not surprising, media buyers do not consider consumer “engagement” with a media vehicle in their decisions, except in secondary, ad-hoc ways. For example, the price of print advertising is determined by circulation, the location of the ad within the publication and characteristics of the ad such as the number of colors; and algorithms used to place banner and sidebar ads do not consider consumer “engagement” with the hosting site. There are many explanations for why consumer “engagement” with the surrounding media context is not considered when making advertising decisions. One reason, as we will demonstrate in the next section, is that many practitioners and academics do not agree on what “engagement” is. Making matters worse, related terms such as “involvement” and “experience” are also used in the academic and trade literatures without any consensus over whether or how they are different from “engagement.” At the same time, advertisers are searching for ways to overcome the problems of ad clutter and avoidance (Cho and Cheon 2004). Leveraging the media context is a potential solution since advertisers have (at least some) control over where their ads appear and we know that context can affect reactions to ads. Moreover, online media is gaining prominence and spending on online advertising is growing at a rapid pace (Shankar and Hollinger 2007). It is important to better understand how engagement is related to the effectiveness of advertising in the context of online media. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we define consumer engagement with a website and its relationship to online experiences. As summarized below, other work has explored distinct online experiences and related concepts. This article conceptualizes engagement as a second-order construct that is manifested in various first-order “experience” constructs. We theorize that our engagement construct is causally related to consumer responses to online advertising. Second, we develop measures of engagement and test our theory by evaluating whether these measures are associated with consumer evaluations of a banner advertisement. We close with a discussion on how understanding engagement can help the online firms manage their sites and advertisers improve the effectiveness of their ads.

It is commonly believed that the web is different from other media in terms of leaning forward instead of backward, being more interactive, more social, and so forth. In this research, we identified and measured eight different types of consumer experiences with online news websites and showed that the measures are reliable with high discriminant, convergent and predictive validity. Based on a factor analysis of the eight experiences, we identified two different kinds of engagement. One factor, Personal Engagement, is manifested in experiences that are very similar to those that people have with newspapers and magazines. For example, people have social experiences with both print and online content by bringing up an article they read; just as reading a newspaper at the breakfast table can be habitual, so can reading a website. The second factor, Social-Interactive Engagement, is weighted more to experiences that are more unique to the web, such as participating in discussions and socializing with others through a site. These experiences give Social-Interactive Engagement its dominant social character. This finding gives empirical support and specificity to the idea that the Internet is a different kind of medium. This work set the stage for examining the effect of online media engagement on advertising. We related experiences and engagement to the ratings of a banner ad using a quasi-experimental design. The results show that both Personal and Social-Interactive Engagement affect reactions to the banner ad. Therefore, in addition to the Personal Engagement context effects that have been demonstrated previously for traditional media, the interactive component of a user's experience with a website is also shown to affect advertising. The results of a regression model including both types of engagement indicate that Social-Interactive Engagement affects reactions to ads after controlling for Personal Engagement. We conclude that online media do involve a distinct form of engagement and that this engagement has its own impact on advertising effectiveness. Our conclusions are subject to the limitations of our methodology. Three points should be kept in mind. First, no matter how “representative” the ad used in this study might be, further research is called for to examine different product categories and types of advertising execution. It is possible to formulate many hypotheses in this regard. For example, ads that are more interactive may have even stronger relationships (i.e., greater slopes) with Social-Interactive Engagement. Second, it would also seem desirable to conduct future research with actual insertion of ads on websites rather than only intercepting users on the sites. This might have some value in being a more “realistic” methodology with potentially better external validity. We note, however, that at best achieving external validity through matching a research setting with some “real” context is always fraught with difficulty (Calder et al., 1983 and Sternthal et al., 1987). It is never possible to duplicate the exact context, or even to know what key variable might be missing. In our view additional work with ads varying along theoretically motivated dimensions would be valuable. Third, we have tested the relationship between engagement ad effectiveness for 11 websites. It is desirable to test this relationship with more sites. Taking into consideration the limitations of this study, we believe that the effects of online media experiences on advertising are potentially pervasive and need further investigation. While previous research has suggested the importance of online experiences and the possibility of context effects on advertising, the present study provides a systematic approach to examining the types of engagement produced by specific experiences with online sites and shows that it is engagement that produces the context effect on online advertising. Further, the distinctive Social-Interactive Engagement associated with the web not only increases advertising effectiveness but does so independently of the type of engagement usually associated with more traditional media. This implies that interactive marketers may find online media to have added potential as a marketing tool. Finally, the principle of engagement and its effects on communication effectiveness could be extended to other media such as mobile media and the social media. The use of mobile media is growing rapidly and more consumers are engaged with their mobile devices than before (Shankar and Balasubramanian 2009). Furthermore, social media provide a glue for further consumer engagement. Understanding the effects of engagement on communication effectiveness in such media is important for both researchers and practitioners.