The Reach and Persuasiveness of Viral Video Ads
Many video ads are designed to go viral so that the total number of views they receive depends on customers sharing the ads with their friends. This paper explores the relationship between the number of views and how persuasive the ad is at convincing consumers to purchase or to adopt a favorable at...
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
2015
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/99172 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1847-4832 |
| _version_ | 1811089397641117696 |
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| author | Tucker, Catherine Elizabeth |
| author2 | Sloan School of Management |
| author_facet | Sloan School of Management Tucker, Catherine Elizabeth |
| author_sort | Tucker, Catherine Elizabeth |
| collection | MIT |
| description | Many video ads are designed to go viral so that the total number of views they receive depends on customers sharing the ads with their friends. This paper explores the relationship between the number of views and how persuasive the ad is at convincing consumers to purchase or to adopt a favorable attitude towards the product. The analysis combines data on the total views of 400 video ads, and crowd-sourced measurement of advertising persuasiveness among 24,000 survey responses. Persuasiveness is measured by randomly exposing half of these consumers to a video ad and half to a similar placebo video ad, and then surveying their attitudes towards the focal product. Relative ad persuasiveness is on average 10% lower for every one million views that the video ad achieves. The exceptions to this pattern were ads that generated views and large numbers of comments, and video ads that attracted comments that mentioned the product by name. Evidence suggests that such ads remained effective because they attracted views due to humor rather than because they were outrageous. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T14:18:32Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/99172 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | en_US |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T14:18:32Z |
| publishDate | 2015 |
| publisher | Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/991722022-09-29T08:33:22Z The Reach and Persuasiveness of Viral Video Ads Tucker, Catherine Elizabeth Sloan School of Management Tucker, Catherine Elizabeth Many video ads are designed to go viral so that the total number of views they receive depends on customers sharing the ads with their friends. This paper explores the relationship between the number of views and how persuasive the ad is at convincing consumers to purchase or to adopt a favorable attitude towards the product. The analysis combines data on the total views of 400 video ads, and crowd-sourced measurement of advertising persuasiveness among 24,000 survey responses. Persuasiveness is measured by randomly exposing half of these consumers to a video ad and half to a similar placebo video ad, and then surveying their attitudes towards the focal product. Relative ad persuasiveness is on average 10% lower for every one million views that the video ad achieves. The exceptions to this pattern were ads that generated views and large numbers of comments, and video ads that attracted comments that mentioned the product by name. Evidence suggests that such ads remained effective because they attracted views due to humor rather than because they were outrageous. National Science Foundation (U.S.) (CAREER Award 6923256) NET Institute 2015-10-06T19:31:59Z 2015-10-06T19:31:59Z 2014-10 2011-11 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 0732-2399 1526-548X http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/99172 Tucker, Catherine E. “The Reach and Persuasiveness of Viral Video Ads.” Marketing Science 34, no. 2 (March 2015): 281–296. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1847-4832 en_US http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2014.0874 Marketing Science Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ application/pdf Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) SSRN |
| spellingShingle | Tucker, Catherine Elizabeth The Reach and Persuasiveness of Viral Video Ads |
| title | The Reach and Persuasiveness of Viral Video Ads |
| title_full | The Reach and Persuasiveness of Viral Video Ads |
| title_fullStr | The Reach and Persuasiveness of Viral Video Ads |
| title_full_unstemmed | The Reach and Persuasiveness of Viral Video Ads |
| title_short | The Reach and Persuasiveness of Viral Video Ads |
| title_sort | reach and persuasiveness of viral video ads |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/99172 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1847-4832 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT tuckercatherineelizabeth thereachandpersuasivenessofviralvideoads AT tuckercatherineelizabeth reachandpersuasivenessofviralvideoads |