Social media and video advertising continues to play an important role in increasing brand awareness. According to Statista (2019), the total advertising spending on digital advertisements in Singapore is approximately US$342million. Out of the amount, US$63million is from social media advertising and US$19.2million is on video advertising. Facing the ubiquity of social media and video advertising, scholars have been conducting different researches to deal with this media phenomenon, particularly in the context of YouTube advertising.
Different from extant studies about YouTube advertising, this paper aims to develop and test a comprehensive and feasible conceptual framework about how advertising characteristics and technological interactivity influence target audience’s receptiveness of designated advertising messages and even their behavioral intention. To do so, survey was conducted with 172 Internet savvy viewers aged 13 to 80 in Singapore. This age group represents three-quarters of the population in Singapore. Besides, structural equation modeling was employed to deal with the relationship among diverse variables.
The study highlighted that online advertising was different from other traditional advertising formats. Social media and video advertising length influenced communication effectiveness. Surprisingly, shorter advertising length (e.g. 15 seconds) resulted in better brand recognition and brand recall than longer advertising length (e.g. 30 seconds). Besides, advertising viewers were more receptive to watch the full advertisement if it was informative, because advertising value was positively perceived by the viewers. As to message obtrusiveness, watching an advertisement more than 3 times was negatively associated to message receptiveness, because obtrusiveness was usually associated to feeling of annoyance. The ability to skip the advertisement made the advertisements less annoying even though it has the same level of obtrusiveness. Furthermore, target audience was more receptive to the advertisement and more likely to engage in the comments section if the advertisement invited discussion or technological interactivity. Engagement and attention in the advertisement would improve brand recognition later.
To conclude, advertising length, advertising informativeness, message obtrusiveness, and technological interactivity had a direct positive impact on social media users’ message receptiveness. The research implication is that advertisers should consider to create advertisements that are both informative and interactive so that it would positively affect audience’s message receptiveness, brand recognition and even purchase intention. Besides, advertisers are suggested to give audience a “skip the ad” option as implementing the skip feature is likely to diminish target audiences’ feelings of annoyance which later will result in favorable brand attitude and increased purchase intention.