Effect of short video ads on sales through social media: the role of advertisement content generators

Abstract

With the rapid development of e-commerce and social media in China, user-generated short video ads through social media have become very popular. However, the unique elements and phenomena for user-generated short video ads through mobile platforms have not yet been investigated. Therefore, a theoretical framework is proposed to explain the effect of user-generated social media short video ads on product sales from the perspective of advertisement sociability and vividness attributes, especially considering the moderation effect of advertisement content generators, including influencers, sellers and buyers. An empirical study using data from the Douyin platform and the Taobao e-commerce platform was conducted using dynamic panel models. The results indicate that the number of comments as one of the advertisement sociability attributes and female vividness and music vividness as two of the advertisement vividness attributes have consistently positive effects on product sales. The moderating effects of the influencer and the seller are positive for the effect of sociability on product sales, whereas the moderating effect of the buyer is positive for the effect of vividness on product sales. Thus, the best strategy to promote products through user-generated short video ads on mobile short video sharing platforms is for buyers to publish short video ads with music and a female or both a male and a female together; moreover, having a large number of comments increases product sales.