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The advertising climate is changing rapidly. With the expansion of the internet into portable devices, the immediacy with which consumers seek and obtain new information has led to – at least theoretically – an improvement in advertisers’ ability to target consumers. Though broadcast TV is still the largest single medium by consumption time, the gap between TV and internet consumption is narrowing. According to Zenith’s annual Media Consumption Forecasts (2018), it is predicted that by 2020, daily internet consumption will surpass daily television consumption for the first time. Companies have reacted to this shift in media usage, with spending on digital advertising (display, video, search, social) surpassing that on TV for the first time in 2017 (Magna, 2018). Central to this shift is the idea that digital advertising has the potential to target the appropriate consumers in context-specific ways – at the right place and the right time (Yuan and Tsao, 2003; De Pessemier et al., 2008; Xu et al., 2008; Li and Du, 2012; Bleier and Eisenbeiss, 2015) and with the right products (Bart et al., 2014). How to best target consumers is still a matter of debate.
One reason the execution of maximally targeted digital advertisements lacks consensus is that, prior to the internet, it was relatively simple to categorize advertisements into print (which were necessarily static) and radio and television (which were mostly dynamic). As such, much of what we know about consumer processing of advertisements occurred in these discrete media. Online advertising began an era of advertising that was completely new, whereby digital advertisements can be static or dynamic, immersive or peripheral and sequential or simultaneous. Consequently, though the advertising community still generally accepts and uses findings from these older formats in newer media, few studies have tested whether these concepts apply in the digital space. This study focuses on digital video advertising (DVA), and we posit that DVA most closely resembles TV commercials and that models applied to TV commercials are also most appropriate for DVA. Television advertising is dynamic and transformational (Puto and Wells, 1984); it is also sensory rich (Liu and Stout, 1987), with moving images (Lim et al., 2015). Marketing researchers have described DVA similarly (Voorveld et al., 2012; Goodrich et al.