Context Centrality in Distributions of Advertising Messages and Online Consumer Behavior

Purpose: As moment-based marketing messages (i.e., messages related to current moments or event), companies put significant investments to distribute TV advertising related to external moments in a retail environment. While the literature offers strong support for the value of distributions of context-based messaging to advertisers, less attention has been given to how to design those messages to effectively communicate across channels. This research adds a new dimension of analysis to the study of advertising context and its cross-channel effects on online consumer behavior. Research Design, Data and Methodology: A system-of-equations Tobit regression model was adopted using data collected from an advertising agency that consists of 1,223 TV ads aired during the Rio Olympics and NCAA, tagging from consumers, and a text analysis. Results: First, TV ads with high centrality of context lead to lower online search behavior and higher online social actions. Second, how brands can design messages more effectively was explored by using product information as a moderator that could improve the impact of context-based TV advertisements. Conclusions: Given that expenses in traditional channels are still one of the biggest channel management decisions, it is critical to understand how consumer engagement varies by design of context-based TV advertising.