Effect of AI Generated Content Advertising on Consumer Engagement

With a series of major breakthroughs in AI technology, the use of AI generated content (AIGC) has become one of the most popular research topics. Social media marketing has become also a mainstream and irreplaceable way for marketing subject. Many companies are starting to use AI technology to optimize existing marketing activities to reduce costs and improve efficiency. However, how companies use the latest AIGC to generate ads that affects consumers engagement needed to be further discussed. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how firm used AIGC advertising influence customer psychological engagement and behavioral engagement with the consideration of ad emotion level and whether the firm used AIGC is explicitly labeled. Online experiments are conducted and data is analyzed through MLR models. Results show that AIGC could positively influence customer both psychological and behavior engagements, with psychological engagement being mediating factor between AIGC and behavioral engagement. Emotion level plays a negative moderating role. In addition, we find that labeling AI-generated advertisements does significantly affect customer behavior engagement.