Cognitive and Experiential Effects of Advertising Variation Strategies on Social Media: Roles of Elaboration, Ad Credibility, and Experiential Pleasure

The present study examines the cognitive and experiential effects of advertising variation strategies in platform selection and content creation on social media. In particular, it looks at how platform variation and content variation impact purchase intent through elaboration, ad credibility, and experiential pleasure. An online experiment conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 739) finds that content variation affects purchase intent via two routes - cognitive and experiential routes. The cognitive route has three pathways: through the number of positive ad-related thoughts, through ad credibility, and through ad credibility and the number of positive ad-related thoughts sequentially; the experiential route involves experiential pleasure as the mediating mechanism. In terms of platform variation, multiple platforms bring users greater experiential pleasure, but no other effects are confirmed. More theoretical and practical implications are discussed.