Attitudes And Responsing Behaviors Toward Digital Advertising:From Perspectives Of Self-presentational Desire And Serial Position Effects

Digital advertising enables precision marketing,which uses Internet-based advertising tools to manage,track,analyze and improve online advertising campaigns,analyze user demographics,interests and habits,personalize promotions and achieve quantifiable results.Sponsored search advertising,social media advertising and display advertising are the three main forms of digital advertising.At present,researches on the antecedents of advertising response mainly focus on the following aspects: the characteristics of consumer,advertiser,advertising and media,consumer motivation,social factors,etc.These studies provide valuable insights for our understanding of advertising response in different contexts.However,for different advertising media and platforms,consumers’ advertising response will be affected by special factors related to the characteristics of the media or advertisements.Therefore,we need to analyze the uniqueness of different media in order to better understand the factors and mechanisms of consumers’ response to advertising,and provide inspiration for advertising platforms and advertisers to formulate advertising strategies.Self-presentation desire and serial position effect are two important characteristics that distinguish digital advertising from traditional advertising.Self-presentation reflects how people expect others to view them,and they will selectively provide relevant information about themselves in order to construct and maintain the desired social image.Social media platforms deliver native ads in a targeted way,and for consumers,the native ads they receive reflect the labels that social media platforms attach to them.People engage in advertising(like,comment and share)and this engagement is visible to others.To some extent,it reflects a unique motivation closely related to personal image building and impression development,that is,the desire for self-presentation.For consumers,the ads they receive reflect the labels placed on them by advertising platforms.Therefore,in order to construct and maintain their desired online identity,people are willing to accept and have a strong motivation to participate in advertising and engage in social interaction with advertising content.Existing research on advertising response has not explained the above phenomenon,and there is still a lack of research on advertising response(such as advertising attitude,advertising participation and purchase intention)from the perspective of self-presentation desire.Therefore,this study aims to fill this literature gap.Serial position effect describes the relationship between sequence position and memory,known as the U-shaped curve,in which people tend to recall information near the top(high)and near the bottom(low)in a list.Ad ranking refers to the order in which ads are presented in sponsored listings by search engines in response to queries from searchers,as well as the natural search results displayed on sponsored search results pages.Advertising ranking is very important to the advertising performance,and the form of advertising based on rankings is also developing very fast.The existing research on advertising response has not explored the effect of advertising rankings on advertising response.Besides,the previous literature about advertising rankings are mainly focused on advertising behavior performance(i.e.,click,click-through rates,conversion rates),and advertising attitudes and purchase intentions are the important components of the intangible effect of advertising.Therefore,it is very necessary to explore the potential impact of advertising rankings on consumer’s advertising attitude and purchase intention.This work investigated consumer’s attitudes and responsing behaviors toward digital advertising: from perspectives of self-presentational desire and serial position effects through four research.Studies 1 and 2 explain the path that people respond positively to social media native advertising from the perspective of self-presentation desire respectively,namely advertising attitude and purchase intention.Study 3 and Study 4 focus the influence of sponsored search advertising ranking on consumer’s advertising response and the path mechanism from the perspective of advertising rankings respectively,namely advertising attitude and purchase intention.The results prove that(1)The desire for self-presentation is a key determinant of advertising attitude and engagement with social media native ads.Advertising attitude plays a mediating role between self-presentation desire and advertising engagement.In addition,self-presentational desire is influenced by social network involvement and social network presentational norms.(2)Self-presentation desire has a positive impact on purchase intention.Materialism has a moderating effect on the relationship between self-presentation desire and advertising purchase intention,while advertising involvement has not.(3)Advertising rankings are the key determinant of consumer’s attitude towards advertising,and the relationship between advertising rankings and advertising attitude is partially mediated by perceived advertising relevance and advertising recall,respectively.Advertisers’ brand awareness positively moderates the relationship between advertising rankings and advertising attitude,but consumer’s trust in search engines has no significant moderating effect.In addition,this study also verifies that the advertising rankings have both the primacy effect and the recency effect on advertising recall.(4)Advertising rankings have a positive impact on advertising attitudes and purchase intentions.In addition,consumer’s search skills will positively enhance the relationship between advertising rankings and purchase intention.This work contributes to our understanding of advertising responses from perspectives of self-presentational desire and serial position effects and generates several critical managerial insights for advertising platforms and advertisers.