Divergent or relevant is better? The interaction effect of creative advertising under AI participation and sensation seeking tendency on visiting intention

Creative advertising has been widely used in tourism destination marketing, and artificial intelligence (AI) generation technology inspires creators’ thinking with its accurate big data and strong content generation ability and helps and enables the output and iterative upgrading of tourism creative advertising. In this context, how destination marketing organizations use AI generation technology to improve the delivery effect and conversion rate of creative advertising has become the focus of the tourism industry, but the attention of the academic community is still limited. Based on this, based on schema congruity theory, this study examines the interactive effects of AI's participation in creative advertising and sensation seeking tendency on visiting intention. In order to verify the hypothesis, we conducted an empirical analysis of 805 potential tourists from China through two scenario experiments and found that when a destination publishes divergent creative ads, it can improve the visiting intention of tourists with a high sensation seeking tendency. When a destination publishes relevant creative ads, it can better improve the visiting intention of tourists with a low sensation seeking tendency. In addition, we found the mediating role of processing fluency in the interactive effects of creative advertising and sensation seeking tendency on visiting intention and the moderating role of AI identity disclosure in the main effect relationship. It provides a reference for destination marketing organizations to learn how to use AI-generation technology for developing creative ads.