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1. Introduction
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. (Nelson Mandela)
With the growth of the global Internet economy, social media has become an important marketing communication tool and channel (Yuan et al., 2021). Social media provides a suitable area for promoting customer relationships, building customer communities and communicating with customers (McCarthy et al., 2014). Thus, many marketers have started using social media for advertising. Zote (2020) reported more than $89 billion social media advertising spending in 2019, with an annual rate of 8.7%, and that it could reach $102 billion by 2020. The fact shows that social media advertising might become a mainstream marketing in the future. Due to the growth and popularity of social media advertising, how to attract the attention and interest of consumers to it and further positively influence their attitudes toward an ad and increase their purchase intention have become essential for digital marketing. Facebook has become a main platform of social media advertising because of the growth of the Facebook user population. Hence, it is imperative for businesses to have a comprehensive understanding of the behavioral attitudes of this target market (Duffett, 2015).
Along with the rapid growth of the internet, unique Internet cultures flourish, for instance, the formation of netizens and netizen language. Netizens refer to citizens of the internet (MacKinnon, 2012) who proactively receive information about different events and express their opinions and sentiments regarding online events. These online events often influence related offline events, in which netizens play central roles (Tan et al., 2012). Besides, netizens have developed plenty of unique language terms on online communities and forums. These unique language terms, which are called netizen language, have become popular on the internet due to netizen's constant usage, forming a unique and popular culture of netizens.
Code-switching refers to the use of more than one language, style or form of expression to communicate or convey information to each other in dialog, text, video and other messaging situations (Romaine, 1992). Research on code-switching advertising mainly explores the advertising effectiveness of bilingual language switching, such as the switching between English and Spanish (e.g....