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Current Issue Summary
June 2021 (Vol. 61, Issue 2)

Exploring the Value of Shoppable Live Advertising: Liveness and Shoppability in Advertising Media and Future Research Avenues
Live, interactive advertising is on the rise, fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, such “shoppable live advertising events” attracted over 560 million Chinese consumers and “generated more than $15.5 billion (WARC, 2021),” observed Kirk Plangger, Zixuan “Mia” Cheng and Jianyu Hao (all three at King’s Business School, King’s College London), Yiru Wang (State University of New York at Oswego), Colin Campbell (University of San Diego) and Sara Rosengren (Stockholm School of Economics). Although this evolving platform is too new for empirical analysis, this research team has developed a typology which, they believe, will act as a springboard for future research and improved practice. Indeed, researchers and practitioners can use the typology for evaluating the “value and appropriateness of liveness in advertising, and for comparing shoppable livestreams, social media ads, teleshopping and television commercials.” Among the managerial takeaways:

  • The pandemic has given rise to new forms of live advertising that, while similar to infomercials, offer new functionalities due to their digital nature.
  • Allowing for the synchronous production and consumption of media, a live ad typically offers a sociable atmosphere and, delivered interactively online, reduces friction along the path to purchase.
  • The typology offered outlines how shoppable, live advertising compares to other advertising media in terms of richness, temporal copresence, sociability and shoppability.
  • Future research could investigate the place of live ads in the promotional mix and the extent to which they complement or substitute for other ad forms. Researchers also could scrutinize the potential positive and negative effects of live ads.

Read the full article here.