Interactive advertising sits at the intersection of technology, consumer behavior, and communication, and now extends into an ecosystem reshaped by generative artificial intelligence, augmented reality/virtual reality, and ultra-fast networks. This work argues that understanding the current environment requires an interdisciplinary research approach that integrates theories and methods from various disciplines. Using interactivity as the core construct, this research advances an organizing framework across three levels: technological, psychological, and socio-communicative. It explains how six theoretical perspectives (media richness, processing fluency, elaboration likelihood, self-disclosure, uses and gratifications, and narrative/storytelling) jointly explain consumers’ experience, co-create, and respond to interactive messages. Complementary perspectives (construal-level, persuasion knowledge, and regulatory focus) extend the framework by clarifying when distance, awareness of persuasion, and motivational fit influence effects. This discussion illustrates how emerging technologies operationalize interactivity (e.g., real-time adaptation, immersive presence, algorithmic personalization) while raising ethical imperatives for transparency, privacy, equity, and consumer protection. Additional insight is offered on methodological contributions, including epistemological alignment, hybrid designs, and qualitative inquiry to capture interactivity as both a measurable feature and a lived experience. The contribution is a comprehensive conceptual foundation that synthesizes distinct theories into a coherent, cross-level account of interactivity, offering clear implications for theory-building, research design, and practice, including ethical personalization, data-informed storytelling, and interface design that enhances engagement without cognitive overload. This synthesis positions interactive advertising as a field that draws from and contributes to allied disciplines, advancing effective, innovative, and responsible strategy in a rapidly evolving digital ecosystem.

With advances in computer-generated technologies and artificial intelligence, virtual influencers (VIs) are likely to play a critical role in shaping interactive advertising within immersive environments. Building on Stern’s (1994) revised communication model for advertising and recent academic discourse on avatars, agents, and social robots, we suggest that VIs challenge the traditional source-message-audience framework by operating across corporeal, hybrid, and simulated domains. Unlike human influencers, whose agency relies on human intention, VIs involve layered authorship, programmed behaviors, and adaptive algorithms that blur the roles of creators, brands, and audiences. In immersive settings, VIs are embodied and occupy the virtual space, co-creating experiences with users that can enhance persuasion through presence, parasocial bonds, and adaptability. Yet, they also raise issues of transparency, accountability, and ethics. We situate VIs as communicative sources shaped by both human and nonhuman systems, emphasizing the need for future research into their evolving identities, agency, and societal influence within advertising ecosystems.

Interactive advertising has transformed the relation between consumers and advertisers, with data collection and processing now at its core. Dataveillance—the automated tracking and analysis of large volumes of digital traces—plays a crucial role in enhancing personalization in interactive advertising. However, the increasing reliance on dataveillance raises significant concerns, including impacts on privacy, individual autonomy, ethical considerations, and societal inequalities. This article examines the role of dataveillance across the interactive advertising process, highlighting its implications for the interactions between consumers and advertisers, and its resulting challenges. By mapping these challenges, this article advances theoretical understanding of the interplay between interactive advertising and dataveillance and offers a research agenda to guide future investigations. The research agenda focuses on the impact of dataveillance on advertising effectiveness, consumer interactions, and advertising research.

Virtual influencers (VIs) have been prevalently integrated into the marketing efforts on social media nowadays. Their controllability, innovativeness, and time- and cost-effectiveness highlight the need for investigating their prospects as corporate social responsibility (CSR) endorsers by examining public perceptions as well as narrative strategies embedded in their messages. Addressing their marketing potential, the current study aims to explore how VIs can serve as effective CSR endorsers. Utilizing text mining, we (1) computationally analyzed real-life consumer reactions toward their CSR posts; and (2) examined how consumer reactions are shaped by VIs’ perceived humanness. Although humanlike VIs elicited higher engagement due to their closer psychological distance and visual likeness with audiences, the conversation topics centered around visual attributes, criticism, and skepticism, whereas cartoonlike VIs induced higher support, personal interactions, and conversations around the social cause. The findings have significant implications for marketers aiming to hire VIs in communicating imminent social causes through effective endorsement strategies.

Digital brand activism is a growing phenomenon in advertising and marketing. This conceptual paper advances this emergent literature by examining firms’ implementation of brand activism on social media and consumers’ varied reactions. It highlights the benefits of social media as the primary vehicle for campaign dissemination, as well as its propensity to amplify criticisms and polarization. However, the unique contributions of digital brand activism to the broader societal agenda remain underexplored. We propose collective action as the primary goal for change-oriented digital brand activism and underscore the significance of outcome expectancy in achieving this goal, offering a clear pathway for mobilizing consumers and demonstrating how individual contributions can be pooled to create significant social impact. We adopt the theory synthesis approach to summarize and integrate knowledge to advance a framework that identifies (1) key challenges that arise for digital brand activism, and (2) corresponding literature-informed strategies to overcome these challenges and achieve collective action.

Consumers encounter personalized ads while online, some of which are excessively tailored and reflect consumers’ past online activities. This degree of personalization can feel invasive, prompting websites to provide their privacy policies. Across two studies, we explored the effects of online behavioral advertising (OBA) with transparent privacy policy on consumers’ evaluations of advertisements. In the first study, we hypothesized that an OBA campaign with a gain- or loss-framed transparent privacy policy would affect advertising effectiveness through perceived transparency and surveillance. Study 1 revealed that personalized advertising with a transparent privacy policy message can invoke both perceived transparency and surveillance, which have positive and negative relationships with advertising effectiveness, respectively. However, the anticipated gain and loss framing of privacy policy disclosure did not adjust the perceptions of transparency and surveillance. In Study 2, we explored the effects of personalized ads with anthropomorphic privacy policy messages on algorithmic awareness, as an underlying factor of personalization, to explain the mixed feelings. Results showed that anthropomorphic privacy policy messages moderated the effect of personalized ads on algorithmic awareness, leading to perceptions of transparency and surveillance. These findings emphasize the nuanced interplay between transparency messages and algorithmic awareness in shaping advertising effectiveness. Our data offer design insights for transparent messages that inform data collection and processing, aiming to improve the consumer experience in OBA.

This study examines the factors influencing the effectiveness of influencer activism in shaping self-branding and advocating for social issues through a social influence lens, focusing on influencer type (human vs. artificial intelligence [AI]) and race (Black vs. White). Two experiments examined the interplay between influencers’ social identity and influencer–issue congruence: one with human-centric racial issues (Study 1) and another for AI-involved racial issues (Study 2). Results indicated that in-group (human) and minority (Black) influencers received more positive evaluations compared to out-group (AI) and majority (White) influencers, which further enhanced evaluations of the issue. Additionally, the minority influence (Black over White) effect was more pronounced for out-group AI influencers than for in-group human influencers, particularly in the context of human-centric issues. Furthermore, the in-group preferences could be mitigated by increasing the issue relevancy to out-group sources. This study sheds light on the complex interplay between influencer type, race, and issue type, offering insights into optimizing influencer and cause selection for effective influencer activism.

Guided by existing brand-activism literature, this study investigates the rising phenomenon of brands taking a public stance on controversial issues to advocate for societal changes. Based on one-on-one, in-depth interviews, this study delineates the conceptual differences between brand activism and corporate social responsibility (CSR), proposes a new conceptualization of brand activism, and explicates consumers’ responses to brand activism acts. We propose a new conceptualization of brand activism, defined as values-based, controversial, focused on external communications, and driven by public interest. We also unpack factors that potentially shape consumers’ perceptions of authenticity in brand activism activities—measurable action, brand-cause fit, and consistency. Furthermore, we explore consumers’ responses to brand-activism acts and show that consumers generally rate these actions favorably. The study offers a comprehensive conceptualization of brand activism that is empirically substantiated and explicates factors shaping its perceived authenticity and consumer reactions. These findings advance current literature on brand activism and CSR.

The prominence and profitability of influencer marketing have facilitated a proliferation of virtual influencers—fictitious digital personalities created and managed using artificial intelligence. Virtual influencers may offer advertisers greater creative control and yield greater engagement than human influencers. Hence, we investigated these claims by comparing the persuasion strategies and outcomes between human and virtual influencers. We retrieved 99,680 English-language Instagram posts uploaded by 424 human and virtual influencers within the beauty, fashion, and lifestyle domains from 2020 to 2022. Dictionary-based sentiment analysis (replicated across the AFINN and Bing lexicons) indicated that Instagram posts from both types of influencers predominantly conveyed positive sentiment. Latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling revealed that both types of influencers asserted opinion leadership differently: Human influencers engaged in active self-promotion, while virtual influencers emphasized their identity. A natural experiment found that human influencers elicited greater engagement than virtual influencers. Influencer tier also significantly interacted with Instagram verification to affect engagement. Theoretical contributions, managerial implications, and directions for future research are discussed.

This research investigates the role played by influencer relations professionals—also known as influencer intermediaries—in driving upfront and compliant disclosure of sponsorships in influencer marketing. Using semistructured interviews with 21 influencer relations professionals in Canada, the research identifies how influencer intermediaries can support sponsorship disclosure in three areas: (1) legal contracts and statements of work, (2) formal and informal content vetting processes, and (3) intermediary knowledge transfer. Using Bourdieu’s sociological theory of field as a theoretical lens and analytical tool, the findings identify how these intermediaries have access to forms of social, cultural, and technical capital that can influence best disclosure practices. This research has implications for theory and practice by contributing to research in influencer relations management and by suggesting sponsorship disclosure solutions that emerge directly from the perspectives of influencer relations professionals.