Exploring Gender Receptivity on the Process and Outcome of ‘Social Networking Site Advertising Evaluation’

Abstract

One of the major highlights of Web 2.0 phenomenon is Social Media technologies which offer greater interactivity and collaboration. Advertisers are unleashing the potential of social networks to enhance the viewership of their brands and target the right audience. Amidst the myriad of competing visual fields calling for consumers’ attention on social media sites, personalized ads are used to break the cluttered landscape. The targeting techniques are employed by tracking browsing activities of the user (digital cookies) and covertly managing a database of their online footprints (data mining analytics). Effects of targeted advertising on SNS are required to be considered along with the delivered ad content to measure SNS advertising effectiveness. This study would investigate the gender differences in cognitive, affective and conative process associated with SNS advertising consumption behaviour. The platform chosen for the experiment is Facebook as Digital In 2018 has declared India as the largest repository of active Facebook users in the world. Also, 60 percent of world’s advertisers rely on Facebook for targeted marketing communications. For this study, gender is operationalized as a binary construct rather than a continuous variable. Primary data have been collected from 211 Facebook users by judgment sampling with the help of pre-structured questionnaire on five point Likert scale. Reliability test using the statistic of Cronbach’s alpha is conducted to assess the inter-item reliability of the measures. For quantitative analysis t-test has been applied to test the hypotheses and validate the results. The analysis is in conformity with the objectives of the study and the hypotheses formulated. Further research contributions and scope for future studies are suggested.