Journal of Advertising

ISSN: 0091-3367 (Print) 1557-7805 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ujoa20

Special Issue Introduction: Digital Engagement

with Advertising

Shelly Rodgers & Esther Thorson

To cite this article: Shelly Rodgers & Esther Thorson (2018) Special Issue Introduction:
Digital Engagement with Advertising, Journal of Advertising, 47:1, 1-3, DOI:
10.1080/00913367.2017.1414003

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2017.1414003

Published online: 13 Feb 2018.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 5490

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Citing articles: 3 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ujoa20
Journal of Advertising, 47(1), 1–3
Copyright Ó 2018, American Academy of Advertising
ISSN: 0091-3367 print / 1557-7805 online
DOI: 10.1080/00913367.2017.1414003
Special Issue Introduction: Digital Engagement
with Advertising
Shelly Rodgers
University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, USA
Esther Thorson
Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA
The topic of digital engagement has received much atten-
tion in recent years but digital engagement and advertising has
previously never been treated as a special issue topic in lead-
ing journals in the field. The purpose of this special issue
of Journal of Advertising on “Digital Engagement with
Advertising” is to extend current understanding of consumers’
digital engagement with advertising as a unique form of
branded content.
Digital engagement has become a buzz phrase and there is
little consensus on how to define it. In marketing, digital
engagement has often been addressed in terms of service-dom-
inant logic or value co-creation, and there are numerous
attempts to conceptualize and empirically examine these con-
cepts (Brodie et al. 2011; Vargo and Lusch 2004). In this spe-
cial issue, digital engagement with advertising is broadly
defined in terms of consumers’ interactions with a brand to
strengthen emotional, psychological, or physical investments
(Chaffey 2007).
In these articles, digital advertising is generally defined as
being one of a variety of forms of “branded content,” for
example, branded mobile apps, any branded content that
appears in social media contexts, and messages from compa-
nies in the form of blogs, tweets, Facebook posts, etc. In some
cases, comments that consumers make about brands in digital
contexts are considered “advertising” in the sense that these
comments are essentially content relevant to a brand (Rodgers
and Thorson 2017).
The definitions of “digital engagement with advertising”
also vary, although there are among these definitions important
Address correspondence to Shelly Rodgers, University of
Missouri, Strategic Communication, 140A Walter Williams Hall,
Columbia, MO 65211, USA. E-mail: srodgers@missouri.edu
Shelly Rodgers (PhD, University of Missouri), Professor of
Strategic Communication, University of Missouri.
Esther Thorson (PhD, University of Minnesota), Professor of
Journalism, Michigan State University.
1
common themes. We look at these definitions from our authors
individually and then comment briefly on some common
themes. As will be seen, the definitional differences result
from the fact that in the digital environment there are so many
kinds of channels in which branded content can appear, and
that content itself can take so many forms.
Baek and Yoo define engagement in terms of the amount of
use a branded app receives and how positively people evaluate
it on a number of attributes like “personalization,” “speed,”
and “fun.” Thus, engagement here includes both behavior
(use) and attitudes (evaluation on the attributes). Both types of
measures are theorized as antecedents to behaviors like con-
tinuing use of the app and recommending it to others, as well
as to verbally report that there is an intention to remain com-
mitted to the brand. Interestingly, the operationalization of
engagement is equated to what others (e.g., Hoehle and
Venkatesh 2015) defined as “usability.” Under this conceptu-
alization, engagement is not a feature of usability, but is equiv-
alent to it. They theorize that the engagement measures
influence brand loyalty, which they defined with a scale
mainly indexing intent to buy the brand again.
Gavilanes, Flatten, and Brettel first distinguish two kinds of
social media advertising: explicit (banner ads) and implicit
(e.g., fan pages or tweets from the company). They employ a
broad definition of social media including such sites as Face-
book and Instagram, but also blogs, video communities, and
dating platforms. For them, engagement is defined in terms of
a hierarchy of levels from lower to higher, i.e., neutral con-
sumption, positive filtering, cognitive and affective process-
ing, and advocacy (highest level). They theorize that social
network advertising is an antecedent to consumer engagement,
which in turn leads to advertising effectiveness. Specifically,
they content analyzed a single company’s types of social net-
work advertising, identifying such categories as product dis-
play, infotainment posts, and posts requesting product
feedback. As theorized, the different types of content differen-
tially predicted responses in the four levels of engagement.
2 S. RODGERS AND E. THORSON
Seo, Li, Choi, and Yoon explore how narrative attributes of
digital ads are related to engagement. They theorize that
engagement with narratives results from a combination of
sender, receiver, and advertising message effects. The authors
suggest that narratives create engagement, likely by a combi-
nation of the effects of empathetic processing, mental simula-
tion of the narrative’s reality, and identification with ad
characters. The engagement created by narratives is theorized
to lead to more sharing of advertisements, as moderated by
whether the sharing is with friends or the general public.
Pentina, Guilloux, and Micu define engagement (similar to
Kahn 1990) as an expression of a consumer’s cognitive and
emotional attitudes via their brand-related engagement behav-
iors in social media. The observed behaviors are posited to be
consequences of engagement. Engagement is indexed in terms
of 11 levels of behaviors that consumers report doing in
response to high-cost, status products advertising messages on
social media.
Yoon, Li, Ji, North, Hong, and Liu, like De Langhe,
Fernbach, and Lichtenstein (2016), conceptualize engagement
as behavior, and as being different from and requiring more
effort than either involvement or brand commitment. For the
authors, the behavior of commenting on a brand message
online is a high-effort response to brands and the occurrence of
this type of engagement is therefore theorized to have a greater
effect on such subsequent processes as purchase decisions.
Voorveld, van Noort, Muntinga, and Bronner focus on how
engagement is a multidimensional psychological experience
that differs qualitatively and quantitatively as a function of use
of social media as such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,
LinkedIn, GoogleC, Snapchat, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Engagement, uniquely, for each of these social media is a mul-
tidimensional profile of experience along dimensions like
innovation, social interaction, empowerment, practical use,
stimulation, and pastime. Indeed, the combination of 11 identi-
fied dimensions of experience is considered, both in terms of
whether they are experienced or not, and to what degree they
are experienced as “engagement.” The authors theorize that
these dimensional profiles of psychological experience for
each type of social media are antecedents to how ads embed-
ded in those media are experienced.
As can be seen, exact definitions of digital engagement with
advertising vary in terms of whether the engagement is cogni-
tive, affective, behavioral, or some combination. In most of
these studies, engagement in branded messages is strongly
related to engagement in the digital context or platform, or
vice versa. Indeed, engagement with advertising in itself is
found to be key to explaining how digital engagement is related
to advertising responses (see in this issue Voorveld et al.).
Some common themes across the special issue studies
include: 1) digital engagement with advertising is located in
the consumer-brand interaction; 2) digital engagement with
advertising has many dimensions, and dimensions have key
quantitative (e.g., volume, intensity) and qualitative (e.g.,
valence) differences; 3) digital engagement is both an anteced-
ent and a consequence in explaining responses to advertising;
4) successful engagement depends on attributes of the branded
content, context, and/or individual experience; and, 5) digital
engagement differs from related concepts, such as involve-
ment or personal relevance and commitment.
One of the most important contributions of the studies in
this special issue is their diverse and creative measures of
engagement, and their success in showing that these measures
are significantly predictive of subsequent behavioral intention
and consumption of brands. The power of digitally based
branded content messages is clearly supported by these stud-
ies, and likely explains the continued abandonment of adver-
tising from purchased media.
Subsequently, many of the strategies and tactics of advertis-
ing presented in the special issue articles represent fundamen-
tal shifts in how brand-related information is created, co-
created, and distributed among consumers, brands, and brand
stakeholders; consumers play an active role in shaping the
meaning of and circulating advertising in social networks (see
Thorson and Rodgers 2017). The result is that brand messages
and digital contexts (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, brand sites, You-
Tube, etc.) that people choose to engage with are much more
complex: sometimes these contexts operate alone, and some-
times these contexts work in tandem with other factors, such
as branded content or user motivations, to influence digital
engagement and advertising evaluations.
Because no other journal has had a special issue on digital
engagement devoted solely to advertising, we were optimistic
that many quality manuscripts would be submitted to this spe-
cial issue and, in fact, our expectations were exceeded. A total
of 55 manuscripts were submitted and competitively reviewed,
and six manuscripts were ultimately selected for this special
issue. In addition to the various definitions presented above,
the six articles are authored by a diversity of researchers from
different countries, spanning a range of topics, and using a
variety of theories, concepts, and methods.
The lead article, “Content Strategies for Digital Consumer
Engagement in Social Networks: Why Advertising Is an Ante-
cedent of Engagement” by Jos
e Manuel Gavilanes, Tessa
Christina Flatten, and Malte Brettel, addresses a critically
important question regarding the role that digital advertising
elements play in a social media strategy. Specifically, the
authors identify seven content categories for social network
advertising and a four-level model for digital consumer
engagement based on consumers’ intermediate mindset
responses. Their results show a significant but unequal influ-
ence of four of the digital advertising categories digital con-
sumer engagement in social networks, and confirm
intermediate responses to digital advertising using real market
data based on Facebook metrics.
In the next article, “Attracting Comments: Digital Engage-
ment Metrics on Facebook and Financial Performance,”
Gunwoo Yoon, Cong Li, Yi (Grace) Ji, Michael North, Cheng
 DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT WITH ADVERTISING
Hong, and Jiangmeng Liu use big data to undertake the chal-
lenge of calculating the ROI of digital engagement with adver-
tising. They do so with macro-level data clustering using
Facebook as a social network context by connecting more than
24 million consumer Facebook posts to S&P 500 companies’
revenue over a five-year time period. Their results challenge
traditional ROI approaches by demonstrating that the number
(volume) and tone (valence) of consumer comments on a
company’s Facebook post can have significant and positive
effects on company revenue.
The next three articles examine how consumer digital
engagement varies with advertising depending on the social
media platform, and how social media platform and adver-
tising can operate separately and/or together to influence
evaluations of advertising. In their article, “Engagement
with Social Media and Social Media Advertising: The Dif-
ferentiating Role of Platform Type,” Hilde A. M. Voorveld,
Guda van Noort, Dani€el G. Muntinga, and Fred Bonner con-
duct a survey of 1,346 social media users aged 13C and
map user engagement experiences on eight different social
media platforms. They connect consumers’ digital engage-
ment experiences with evaluations of advertising appearing
on the eight social media platforms. Their results demon-
strate that digital engagement and advertising evaluations
are sometimes contingent on, and sometimes not contingent
on, the social media platform in which the advertising
appears, suggesting that social media should not be consid-
ered an umbrella concept, as this disregards key qualitative
differences afforded by different digital platforms.
Next, Iryna Pentina, and V
eronique Guilloux, and Anca
Cristina Micu author “Exploring Social Media Engagement
Behaviors in the Context of Luxury Brands,” and identify and
characterize 11 different social media engagement behaviors
based on depth interviews with luxury shoppers in Paris. The
authors define brand engagement in terms of co-creation, argu-
ing that digital brand engagement is a shared and negotiated
process between brands and brand stakeholders. Using brand-
related discourse analysis, the authors develop a conceptual
matrix involving different types of audiences and different lev-
els of engagement effort and creativity exerted by these audi-
ences, resulting in a conceptual mapping of complex
consumer motivations for online content creation with com-
plex motivational combinations of specific engagement
behaviors.
Mobile device use accounts for 65% of all digital time
(ComScore 2016), so it is fitting that our next authors present
a valid and reliable scale on branded app usability as an impor-
tant antecedent to enduring, longer-term consumer engage-
ment with branded mobile platforms. Taking a consumer-
centric approach, Tae Hyun Baek and Chan Yun Yoo, in
“Branded App Usability: Conceptualization, Measurement,
and Prediction of Consumer Loyalty, provide the results of a
13-item, five factor scale of branded app usability, and relate
perceived levels of branded app usability to marketing
3
outcomes. Their results have important theoretical and practi-
cal implications for developing branded app engagement strat-
egies in mobile devices that should prove beneficial to both
advertising scholars and practitioners alike.
Finally, “Narrative Transportation and Paratextual Features
of Social Media in Viral Advertising” by Yuri Seo, Xiaozhu
Li, Yung Kyun Choi, and Sukki Yoon take on perhaps one of
the most challenging issues facing digital marketers, i.e., iden-
tifying factors that boost digital advertising’s ability to go
viral. Informed by narrative transportation theory, the results
of two experiments in South Korea and China reveal that the
experience of narrative transportation has a positive influence
on viral advertising but that the relative strength of this rela-
tionship depends on boundary conditions associated with
information about the sender, advertiser, and/or message
appearing on social media. The authors present compelling
results of how persuasion knowledge resulting from advertis-
ing disclosure can improve the narrative transportation experi-
ence by associating digital advertisements with a higher
numbers of “likes”, thereby increasing social proof of viral
advertising.
Combined, these six articles comprise the special issue of
Journal of Advertising “Digital Engagement with Advertising”
and provide what we believe is a unique contribution to the
advertising field and related areas, which should benefit virtu-
ally anyone wanting to advance theory and/or practice of digi-
tal engagement with advertising.
REFERENCES
Brodie, Roderick J., Linda D. Hollebeek, Biljana Juric, and Ana Ilic (2011),
“Customer Engagement Conceptual Domain, Fundamental Propositions,
and Implications for Research,” Journal of Service Research, 14 (3), 252–
271.
Chaffey, Dave (2007), “Customer Engagement Interview with Richard Sedley
of cScape,” Smart Insights, available at http://www.smartinsights.com/cus
tomer-engagement/customer-engagement-strategy/customer-engagement-
interview-with-richard-sedley-of-cscape/ (accessed May 3, 2016).
ComScore (2016), “Smartphone Penetration Nears 80% of the US Mobile
Market,” available at http://www.marketingcharts.com/online/smartphone-
penetration-nears-80-of-the-us-mobile-market-65214/ (accessed Novem-
ber 11, 2017).
De Langhe, Bart, Philip M. Fernbach, and Donald R. Lichtenstein (2016),
“Navigating by the Stars: Investigating the Actual and Perceived Validity
of Online User Ratings,” Journal of Consumer Research, 42 (6), 817–833.
Hoehle, Hartmut, and Viswanath Venkatesh (2015), “Mobile Application
Usability: Conceptualization and Instrument Development,” MIS Quar-
terly, 39 (2), 435–472.
Kahn, William A. (1990), “Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement
and Disengagement at Work,” Academy of Management Journal, 33 (4),
692–724.
Rodgers, Shelly, and Esther Thorson (2017), Digital Advertising: Theory and
Research, 3rd edition, New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group.
Thorson, Esther, and Shelly Rodgers (2017), “Network Advertising Model
(NAM),” in Digital Advertising: Theory and Research, Shelly Rodgers
and Esther Thorson, eds., New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis
Group, 19–30.
Vargo, Stephen L., and Robert F. Lusch (2004), “Evolving to a New Dominant
Logic for Marketing,” Journal of Marketing, 68 (1), 1–17.