EBITANI Takehiro and KATO Takumi, Senior Assistant Professor receive the Best Oral Paper Award at the Japan Marketing Academy Conference 2024 on October 13, 2024.
Title: The impact of the degree of matching between the private life settings of AI models and product characteristics in advertising on product appeal
Form: Full paper
Authors: EBITANI Takehiro and KATO Takumi
Summary:
Existing research on the advertising effectiveness of models has emphasized the importance of matching external and internal characteristics with product characteristics. However, the subjects of this existing research have been limited to celebrity and non-celebrity models. Recently, there has been a lot of attention paid to the use of advertisements featuring models generated by artificial intelligence (AI) from the perspectives of low cost and low risk. In this study, we set the research question “Does the attractiveness of a product in an advertisement increase when the AI model’s private life settings match the product characteristics?” and conducted three randomized controlled studies. In Study 1, it was found that the use of AI models with high aesthetic sensibilities in social media posts for a beauty drink advertisement increased the appeal of the product. In Study 2, it was shown that the AI model’s attribute setting of being married with children increased the appeal of the product in an advertisement for laundry detergent. In Study 3, although there was no significant difference, the AI model of a Harvard University graduate was evaluated as more attractive than a high school graduate in the news application advertisement. The results of this study, which show that the findings regarding celebrity and non-celebrity models in advertising can also be applied to AI models that do not have a private life, have expanded academic knowledge and provided useful suggestions for practitioners.