Role of Technology in Online Persuasion: A MAIN Model Perspective

Advertisements reach us through a variety of media, from traditional print and broadcast vehicles to newer digital devices, such as computers and mobile phones. As consumers, we tend to focus on the content and form of the ads rather than the media technology used to deliver the ad. However, advertisers know fully well that technology can make a profound difference, as they develop separate campaigns for different media. Advertising budgets are drawn out separately for each medium, with online media attracting a growing share in recent years. Scholarly work, such as that proposed by Figure 1.1 in Chapter 1 of this text, acknowledges that "channels" and "devices" can play a role in determining how advertisements are created, developed, deployed, and received. As evident in Marshall McLuhan's famous quote, "the medium is the message," media technology is not a mere vacant channel. Rather, each medium possesses certain characteristics that shape the mediated environment and thereby affect people's perception of the information presented. According to McLuhan (1964), the psychological effects of media can be powerful enough to surpass the effects of actual message content. Studies in advertising have suggested that we process information differently from different media by demonstrating significant differences in ad recall, attitude towards ads and brands, and purchase intentions (e.g., Dahlen, 2005). The past decade has witnessed an explosion in the development of information and communication technologies that enable easy and rapid communication between advertisers and consumers. As the Internet becomes ever more multi-faceted, with newer devices (e.g., iPad) and newer venues (e.g., social networking sites) offering unprecedented opportunities to advertisers and retailers for reaching their target consumers and promoting their products and services, there has been a growing interest in exploring the role of technology in the persuasive context. Early studies were centered on comparing the effects of online media with offline media. For example, Sundar, Narayan, Obregon, and Uppal (1998) found that individuals actually remembered more of the ad when the same advertisement was presented in the print version of a newspaperthan when it was presented on a website. As the technology surrounding online ads matured, studies began comparing the effects of different types of online ads, such as banner and pop-up (Chatterjee, 2008), ads with and without pulldown menus (Brown, 2002), 2D ads and 3D ads (Li, Daugherty, & Biocca, 2002), and those with and without virtual direct experiences (Griffith & Chen, 2004). In the area of online marketing and e-commerce, the role of media technology has been examined in terms of both functionality, such as different levels of interactivity (Sundar & Kim, 2005), and metrics generated by such functionality, such as consumer reviews and product rankings (Chevalier & Mayzlin, 2006). On the face of it, technological features of online advertisements, such as the 3D effect and interactivity, appear as visual accoutrements, designed primarily to dazzle the consumer by promoting a loose association between their presence on the interface and positive attitudes toward the product advertised. However, these features also bring with them certain additional functions that allow consumers to explore product information more deeply and make a more informed purchasing decision. Therefore, a fundamental theoretical question relates to the nature and depth of cognitive processing engendered by the technology of modern-day advertising. Dual process models in social psychology provide an excellent framework for addressing this and related questions because they conceptualize the dichotomy of shallow as well as effortful consideration of advertisements by consumers.