Tap or Swipe: How Interactive Touch Gestures Matter in Digital Advertising?

ABSTRACT In digital advertising, consumers interact with advertisements through touch gestures such as tapping and swiping. Prior research has examined touch gestures' impact on interaction experience, but largely overlooks their role in influencing consumer information acquisition. Drawing on embodied cognition theory, we conceptualize tapping and swiping gestures as embodied cues that can shape consumer attentional focus. Across four experimental studies in both laboratory behavioral and scenario settings, this study shows that the tapping gesture, which involves a narrow interaction area, enhances attention to product information and increases subsequent purchase intention; the focusing effect of the tapping gesture is present in advertisements highlighting utilitarian benefits but diminished when advertisements highlight hedonic benefits. These findings enrich the literature on embodiment and advertising effectiveness by showing that interactive touch gestures shape attentional focus on advertisement content and influence consumer purchase intention.