August 11 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST | Virtual
Inside the Journal of Advertising Research: Companions, Faces, and Creative Content in the Age of AI Advertising
AGENDA
Now in its sixty-sixth year, the Journal of Advertising Research is the ARF’s flagship journal and publishes rigorous, empirical research from academics and practitioners around the world. Our mission is to connect theory and practice through an independent peer-reviewed process. This Insights Studio highlights three articles recently published in JAR, all of them focused on a single question that advertisers are now facing in practice: when and how do consumers actually accept AI in advertising?
12:00PM
Welcome and Introduction
Colin Campbell, Editor In Chief, Journal of Advertising Research
12:08PM
How Small Talk and Co-Viewing with AI Companions Boost Advertising Effectiveness and Persuasion: Chat, Watch, and Buy
Andy Jeon, Sangwook Lee, and Hye Jin Yoon show that brief, casual conversation with a voice assistant like Alexa can change how people respond to ads they watch alongside it. In a living-room-style lab using galvanic skin response, longer small talk made the assistant feel more human, which lowered irritation with co-viewed commercials and raised both purchase intentions and receptivity to the assistant’s own product recommendations. The effect did not appear with a human co-viewer, suggesting that even minimal social cues from an AI can open a new context for reaching and persuading viewers.
Presenters: Andy Jeon, Northern Illinois University, Sangwook Lee, University of Colorado Boulder, Hye Jin Yoon, University of Georgia
Authors: Yongwoog Andrew Jeon, Yuhosua Ryoo, Sangwook Lee, and Hye Jin Yoon
12:18PM
Is Similarity in Advertising a Double-Edged Sword? The Role of AI-Generated Faces
Arno De Caigny presents a new, image-based way to measure facial similarity and uses it to test how far personalization can go. Purchase intentions rise as an AI-generated face comes to resemble the viewer, but only up to a point. Around 57 percent similarity is optimal, and pushing past it toward near-exact resemblance triggers a too-similar-to-me effect that drives purchase intentions back down. The finding gives practitioners a concrete guardrail for how far to push facial matching when building hyper-personalized campaigns with generative AI.
Presenter: Arno De Caigny, IESEG School of Management and Gudrun Roose, Ghent University
Authors: Arno De Caigny and Gudrun Roose
12:28PM
Rethinking Expectancy Disconfirmation in Consumer Responses to AI-Generated Creative Content
Stefan Bernritter presents six experiments that reverse one of marketing’s most familiar rules. For human creators, beating expectations is rewarded, but for AI the opposite holds. When AI creative overperforms, consumers feel threatened and reject it; when it underperforms, they are more forgiving and more likely to choose it. The work also identifies four levers practitioners can use to make AI work as acceptable as human work.
Presenter: Stefan Bernritter, King’s Business School, King’s College London
Authors: Malgorzata (Mags) Karpinska-Krakowiak and Stefan F. Bernritter
12:38PM
Panel Discussion/Q&A
All speakers join Colin Campbell, Editor In Chief of the Journal of Advertising Research, for a Q&A session.
1:00PM
Event Concludes