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Top1. Introduction And Background
Online advertising has experienced tremendous growth over the past decade. The amount spent online has even surpassed the amount spent on television advertising. The worldwide spending on Internet advertising in 2020 was 41% of the entire market, while in the same period, the amount spent on TV advertising was 28% of the total market (Guttmann, 2021). Despite the effort and money spent on online advertising, research claims that, in general, consumers do not show trust in advertisements (Amawate & Deb, 2021; Obermiller & Spangenberg, 1998). Accordingly, skepticism toward advertising is a predisposition to distrust the claims made in advertisements (Obermiller & Spangenberg, 1998).
Skepticism is considered an essential component of consumer persuasion knowledge and a generalizable belief about how the marketplace operates (Friestad & Wright, 1994). Although the concept of skepticism toward advertising has been considered necessary, it has not been investigated widely. The existing literature has focused on skepticism toward environmental claims (Cheng, Chang, & Lee, 2020; Yu, 2020) or cause-related marketing (Amawate & Deb, 2021; Bae, 2018). However, skepticism toward online advertising, in general, has received limited attention from researchers.
The advertising value model (Ducoffe, 1996) laid the foundations for understanding the effects of advertising characteristics on consumer attitudes. Infotainment in advertising is one such ad characteristic that refers to the integration of informativeness and entertainment (Okazaki, 2004). Overall, the research suggests informativeness (Jacobson, Gruzd, & Hernández-García, 2020) and entertainment (Gaber, Wright, & Kooli, 2019; Koshy & Manohar, 2018) influence consumer attitude toward advertising. Therefore, collectively, infotainment should have a positive influence on consumer attitude toward advertising.
The other ad characteristic which could influence consumer attitude toward advertising is ad puffery. Preston (1996) defines advertising puffery as any action by the advertisers which involves using superlatives, subjective views, concealing evidence, or exaggerations in ads to praise a product or service. Research shows that deceit in marketing is one of the trigger points for consumers’ lack of trust towards advertising (Xie, 2016). Moreover, when exposed to puffed ads, consumers generate adverse reactions and negative product evaluations (Raziq et al., 2018). In addition, when consumers are less skeptical, advertisers exploit them using puffery (Obermiller & Spangenberg, 1998).
Given the current state of research, this study endeavors to fill several gaps in the domain of consumers’ skepticism toward online advertising. First, the existing body of research on STA shows limited attention toward theoretical foundations (Bae, 2018; Obermiller & Spangenberg, 1998). Therefore, the present study integrates the advertising value model (Ducoffe, 1996) and stimulus organism response model (Mehrabian & Russell, 1974) to explain STA. Based on the advertising value model, two ad characteristics, infotainment, and puffery were identified, serving as a stimulus for the organism state. Consumer skepticism toward advertising (STA) has previously been defined as an attitude and consumer’s inclination to disbelieve advertising claims (Obermiller, Spangenberg, & MacLachlan, 2005). Therefore, in the present study, skepticism toward online advertising characterized the organism part of the stimulus-organism-response framework. Accordingly, once skepticism has been developed among consumers, it will lead to responses. Bagozzi (1986) referred to the response state as the final state in the SOR paradigm, which comprises the behaviors and attitudes. Therefore, attitude toward online advertising has been proposed to function as a response state in the SOR model. To date, research integrating advertising value and SOR models to explain STA is not known.