Observing viewers’ self-reported and neurophysiological responses to message appeal in social media advertisements

Marketing research mainly uses self-reported method to record respondents' perceptions of creativity, and while self-reported method has its own merits, there exists some critique, particularly in terms of its ability to adequately capture the influence of message appeal on creativity. This paper studies how viewers’ responses to message appeals in social media advertisement compare in terms of self-reported responses versus responses taken through a neurophysiological method of Electroencephalograph (EEG). Two social media advertisements are displayed through a laboratory experiment to 17 subjects observing the subjects' neurophysiological reactions as well as their self-reported responses with regard to the commercials’ emotional, informational, and brand-related content. Results show that neurophysiological method offers unique details about emotional appeal, which the self-reported method fails to reflect. Furthermore, the neurophysiological measure identifies differences across the two target commercials in the emotional content part, which again are not identified through the self-reported method. This paper advances advertising research in social media literature by comparing content evaluation within advertisement through neurophysiological and self-reported measure. These findings have implications for marketers to use and measure message appeals in advertisement on social media to influence consumer response.