Creative Audiences: Comparing the Effects of Traditional Advertising and User-generated Advertising on Consumer Brand Attitudes and Behaviour

YouTube is the world’s most visited video-sharing website with more than one billion hits per month, exceeding Facebook and Amazon. With over 6 billion video-hours watched monthly and 100 video-hours uploaded every minute, people spend an average of 40 minutes per day watching videos on YouTube. YouTube provides a forum for idea-sharing, and more relevant to this research, for dissemination of a brand or a company’s information. Through YouTube’s strong social networking characteristics, interactive communication and personal brand communications’ control may have a greater impact on brands than firm-generated communications. YouTube users are strongly linked to others producing and sharing similar content with great semantic coherence around the type of content.
YouTube’s video typology ranges from news to advertising with professionally and amateur generated content. User Generated Advertising (UGA) through YouTube is considered a creative, brand-related video conceived outside the firm boundaries, and produced by consumers, with motivations such as intrinsic enjoyment, self-promotion and audience perception changes, rather than sales increases or commercial revenue
From a marketing perspective, the importance YouTube is the online brand exposure. As a piece of brand communication, UGA may be more influential in purchase decisions than traditional firm-consumer models, as interpersonal communications regarding products are more powerful than mass media. Consumers place a higher degree of trust in peer recommendations than in commercial strategies
The aim of this research is to compare the effects of UGA and traditional advertising broadcasted on YouTube, on a consumer’s brand evaluations and behavioural intentions, specifically on purchasing intentions and on intentions to comment or share a video. The research further aims to contribute to existing knowledge on consumer behaviour and decision making by applying the existing attribution theory to explain UGA effects in buying decisions and online brand exposure.
To conduct the study, a sample of 25 videos of global, low involvement and highly advertised brands selected by the researcher was validated by a panel of experts to avoid subjective bias. From this sample, three UGA videos were selected as stimuli for an Internet-based, self-completion questionnaire conducted in a convenience sample of adult Internet users
The results were analysed through a mixed within-between-subjects ANOVA and the findings suggest that when compared to firm-generated advertising, UGA has more impact on brand attitudes and behavioural intentions to purchase the brand and to engage in video sharing than firm advertising.
The theoretical and practical implications of this study may serve academics and practitioners in the understanding of UGA and its attitudinal-behavioural effects on consumers and potential impact on brand equity. Furthermore, the results sustain the managerial necessity to develop and maintain strategies to monitor and respond to negative UGA in social media.