AAA Annual Conference 2018

Rahnuma Ahmed, University of Oklahoma
Doyle Yoon, University of Oklahoma
Nazmul Rony, University of Oklahoma
Seunghyun Kim, University of Oklahoma

This study examined the effects of two critical predictors of native ad effectiveness, attitude toward online news media (An) and content relevance, on the formation of brand cognition, brand attitude and behavioral intention to click on the ad. A 2 (attitude toward online news media: favorable/unfavorable) × 2 (content relevance of native ads: high/low) between-subjects experimental study on 181 samples was conducted on two different brand categories, e.g., utilitarian (smartphone) and hedonic (food). The results of the study found that favorable An significantly led to favorable cognitive and attitudinal reactions in the case of all brand categories, and behavioral reactions only in food brand category. Next, higher content relevance achieved positive cognitive, attitudinal and behavioral reactions in all brand categories, expect for higher intention to click in the case of the smartphone brand. An empirical evidence of interaction between An and content relevance on brand cognition level was also found in the food brand category.