JAR Inside the Research Podcast

Journal of Advertising Research
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This podcast gives listeners a look at the latest research articles published in the Journal of Advertising Research. Listen to authors describe their work and what motivated it, explore challenges they faced in the research process, and describe what they'd like to researched next. 

  1. Sep 10

    How Small Talk and Co-Viewing with AI Companions Boost Advertising Effectiveness and Persuasion: Chat, Watch, and Buy

    Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we speak with Yongwoog Andrew Jeon (Northern Illinois University) to discuss his article, "How Small Talk and Co-Viewing with AI Companions Boost Advertising Effectiveness and Persuasion: Chat, Watch, and Buy," coauthored with Yuhosua Ryoo (University of Minnesota Duluth), Sangwook Lee (University of Colorado Boulder), and Hye Jin Yoon (University of Georgia), published in the June 2026 issue of JAR. Andy explains the question driving the paper: as AI companions move into living rooms, can watching TV with one feel like genuinely watching together, and does that change how people respond to the ads on screen? A preliminary scenario study found that people imagining co-viewing with Alexa reported the same sense of shared viewing as those imagining a human partner. The main study moved into a living room-style lab, where participants made small talk about movies with either an Alexa Echo or a human confederate for one or three minutes, then watched a college football clip with food commercials while galvanic skin response sensors tracked their arousal in real time. Longer conversations made the AI seem more humanlike, a shift that never happened with the human partner, and that perceived humanness set off two chains: higher arousal and lower ad irritation during the commercials, which lifted purchase intentions for the advertised products, and stronger social identification with the AI, which made its own product recommendations more persuasive. The practical takeaway is to build the relationship before the pitch. Pointing to ChatGPT's move toward embedding ads in conversations, Andy argues that AI agents shouldn't sell too aggressively: let rapport form first, then persuade gently, or risk a backfire from users who expect a companion rather than a salesperson.  Our conversation also digs into the project's origins in the final year of Andy's PhD, when "what if we watch TV with a robot?" went from crazy thought to research team, the grind of in-person data collection, and where Andy is headed next: agentic AI and the question of what would make consumers comfortable letting an AI agent spend their money on their behalf. Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1080/00218499.2025.2537503 To keep up to date on the latest JAR news sign up for our newsletter:  https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/su/mtD04QN And follow us on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/82528291/admin/

  2. Sep 3

    (How) Does the Number of Followers Impact the Success of Influencer Marketing? A Construal Level Perspective

    Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we welcome back Kirsten Cowan (The University of Edinburgh) to discuss her article, "(How) Does the Number of Followers Impact the Success of Influencer Marketing? A Construal Level Perspective," coauthored with Ben Marder (The University of Edinburgh), Laura Lavertu (University of Strathclyde), and Jiayuan Li (Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), published in the March 2026 issue of JAR. Kirsten takes on a question that sits behind nearly every influencer campaign: does a bigger following automatically make an influencer more persuasive? The answer is not always.  Drawing on construal level theory, the paper shows that follower count works as a cue of social distance. Macro influencers, with followers in the hundreds of thousands, feel closer and more relatable, while mega influencers with millions of followers feel more distant and aspirational, and persuasion depends on matching that distance to the message. Macro influencers perform best with concrete, direct content, such as overtly tagging the brand and posting on their own channels. Mega influencers are more effective with subtle brand linkages, storytelling, and appearances on the brand's own channel. Secondary Instagram data and three experiments support this matching process, with self-brand connection explaining why the right pairing lifts purchase intentions. The practical takeaway is that brands and PR agencies should stop choosing influencers on follower count alone and instead write different briefs for different tiers: detail, brand tagging, and product-in-use content on the influencer's own page for macro influencers, and benefit-focused, lifestyle-oriented content and brand-channel collaborations for mega influencers. Kirsten also makes the case for working across tiers, since smaller influencers deliver community depth and engagement while larger ones deliver reach and awareness. Our conversation also digs into the project's origins in those top influencer lists ranked purely by follower count, the challenge of comparing engagement across wildly different audience sizes, the trade-off between realism and control when studying real versus fictitious influencers, and future directions like influencer expertise, short-form video, and what happens to authenticity when lifestyle influencers endorse categories outside their lane. Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1080/00218499.2025.2482276 To keep up to date on the latest JAR news sign up for our newsletter:  https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/su/mtD04QN And follow us on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/82528291/admin/

  3. Aug 27

    Is Similarity in Advertising a Double-Edged Sword? The Role of AI-Generated Faces

    Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we speak with Arno De Caigny (IESEG School of Management) to discuss his article, "Is Similarity in Advertising a Double-Edged Sword? The Role of AI-Generated Faces," coauthored with Gudrun Roose (Ghent University), published in the June 2026 issue of JAR. Arno explains the question driving the paper: decades of research show people respond better to ads featuring faces that resemble their own, and generative AI now makes it cheap to push that resemblance as far as an advertiser wants, so is more similarity always better?  The team first built an automated facial similarity measure by adapting the same face recognition technology that unlocks your phone, converting faces into embeddings and scoring resemblance with a cosine distance, then validating the algorithm against human annotators. Across two studies pairing participants' social media profile photos with AI-generated spokespersons in car insurance ads, the relationship between facial similarity and purchase intention traced an inverted U. Low to medium similarity helps, consistent with the familiar similar-to-me effect, but past an optimal point around 57% the effect reverses and purchase intentions fall, which the authors call the too-similar-to-me effect. The practical takeaway for advertisers is to resist the pull toward near-perfect matches and aim instead for the 50% to 70% sweet spot, and Arno adds a warning worth hearing: because generative AI makes it cheap to spin up millions of ad variants, a black-box optimization algorithm can drift into high similarity without anyone deciding it should, so similarity is worth tracking, and the paper's measure runs entirely on open source tools. Context matters too, since hyper-personalization carries more risk in sensitive categories like financial services and healthcare, while transparency and consent can turn the same technology into something consumers actually value, as with virtual try-on experiences. Our conversation also digs into the project's origins in the early wave of deepfakes, the data collection headaches that come with profile pictures as personally identifiable information (Prolific and MTurk were off the table, hence student samples and careful ethics review), and future directions like explaining the mechanism behind the effect and pinning down which dimensions of similarity, from eyes to skin tone to build, actually drive it. Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1080/00218499.2025.2586185 To keep up to date on the latest JAR news sign up for our newsletter:  https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/su/mtD04QN And follow us on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/82528291/admin/

  4. Aug 20

    Revisiting Direct Mail Effectiveness: Balancing Organizational Goals with Consumer Sustainability Concerns

    Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we speak with Jennifer Seokhwa Hong (Seattle University) to discuss her article, "Revisiting Direct Mail Effectiveness: Balancing Organizational Goals with Consumer Sustainability Concerns," coauthored with Chance Michael Ringor (Nordstrom, Inc.), published in the March 2026 issue of JAR. Jennifer explains the puzzle that motivated the research: despite years of predictions that print is dying, direct mail still accounts for more than a third of direct marketing spending worldwide, with $6 billion spent annually in the US alone, even as it carries a real environmental cost, with over 65 billion pieces mailed in 2022 requiring roughly 100 million trees and generating 3.5 million tons of waste, less than 40% of which gets recycled. Across four studies, the team finds that as consumers grow more environmentally conscious, their response to direct mail depends on who's sending it. For nonprofits, direct mail still outperforms email at eliciting donations, but for for-profit companies that advantage disappears entirely. The mechanism is perceived resource inefficiency: when a for-profit sends a glossy brochure, consumers read it as burning money and trees to sell something, but when a charity sends the same thing, they give it a pass as a justified way to raise money for a cause. In a telling boundary condition, nonprofits focused on sustainability lose the advantage too, since resource-intensive mail contradicts their own mission. The practical takeaway for for-profit marketers is that the familiar cost argument against direct mail now comes with a reputational twist, as consumers read channel choice as a signal of what a company values, though Jennifer is careful to note the studies hold open rates constant and measure response conditional on opening. Nonprofits, meanwhile, can keep leveraging direct mail's trust and emotional appeal, unless their cause is environmental. Our conversation also digs into the challenge of making physical mail feel real in an online experiment and future directions extending the core insight: that consumers judge the same resource use differently depending on who's using it, to organizations' adoption of AI. Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1080/00218499.2025.2492430 To keep up to date on the latest JAR news sign up for our newsletter:  https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/su/mtD04QN And follow us on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/82528291/admin/

  5. Aug 13

    Grit in Advertising: How a Promotion Focus Influences Consumer Variety-Seeking

    Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we speak with Logan Pant (Western Michigan University) to discuss his article, "Grit in Advertising: How a Promotion Focus Influences Consumer Variety-Seeking," coauthored with Blair Kidwell (University of North Texas) and Mark R. Gleim (Auburn University), published in the June 2026 issue of JAR. Logan explains how the team treated grit not as a stable personality trait but as something advertising can switch on in the moment, the way a Nike spot or Samsung's "It Takes Grit" campaign does. The evidence runs across a field pilot and three experiments including a coffee shop study where customers scanned a QR code while waiting in line and reported what they ordered today versus what they usually order. The key finding runs against intuition: grit is usually understood as sticking with something, but gritty advertising makes consumers more likely to try something new, and it does so by activating a promotion focus, where people see benefits rather than costs. The practical takeaway is that gritty appeals are a tool for getting people to explore rather than persist. Logan sees the clearest fit for challenger brands and new entrants, the ones who cannot outspend Nike or Apple and need consumers to consider an alternative at all. Fitness and wellness already use this language, but he points to less obvious cases like financial advisors encouraging portfolio diversification. Notably, priming grit produces results similar to priming promotion directly, which matters for brands that have already built grit into their identity. Our discussion also gets into the making of the paper, including the fact that only two of the original dissertation studies survived, the wellness company study came out of the review process, and Logan's candid account of learning how to read reviewer comments as a first-time lead author. On future directions, he discusses brand loyalty and product category as the obvious boundary conditions, since some consumers will not leave Apple or their preferred cereal no matter what the ad says. Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1080/00218499.2025.2576965 To keep up to date on the latest JAR news sign up for our newsletter:  https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/su/mtD04QN And follow us on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/82528291/admin/

  6. Aug 6

    The Impact of Ad Repetition on Viewer Attention in Connected and Linear Television

    Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we speak with Kalyan Rallabandi (Bucknell University) to discuss his article, "The Impact of Ad Repetition on Viewer Attention in Connected and Linear Television," coauthored with Hyung Sup (Zack) Bhan (Radford University) and Seoungwoo Lee (Yonsei University), published in the June 2026 issue of JAR. Kalyan explains how the team used a remarkably rich TVision Insights dataset, shared through the JAR-TVision data release call, that tracks second-by-second attention for over 1,000 viewers via in-home webcams paired with automatic content recognition data. The headline finding is that viewer attention falls with each repeated exposure to an ad, and the decline is noticeably steeper on connected TV than on linear TV, where attention tends to plateau. When the same ad is repeated within narrow windows like a single day or hour, attention decay accelerates on both platforms, but CTV remains the worse offender. The likely culprit is the very thing that makes CTV attractive: viewers there are more engaged and in control, so repeated ad interruptions cost more attention. The practical takeaway for advertisers is that the common instinct to pile repetition onto CTV because engagement is high actually works against you, and wider spacing between exposures is the safer play. Kalyan also points to structural problems in the CTV ecosystem, where walled gardens and weak cross-platform frequency capping leave agencies with little control over how often viewers see the same ad, and suggests attention-based pricing as a natural evolution. Our discussion also digs into the endogeneity challenge behind the scenes, where naïve estimates showed attention rising with repetition until granular viewer-by-ad fixed effects revealed the true pattern, plus future directions like linking attention to sales outcomes and modeling the wear-in and wear-out sweet spot for repetition. Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1080/00218499.2025.2538940 To keep up to date on the latest JAR news sign up for our newsletter:  https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/su/mtD04QN And follow us on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/82528291/admin/

  7. Jul 30

    Advertising Professionals' Views on Advertising Seemingly Related to Offline Conversations

    Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we speak with Claire Segijn (University of Minnesota) and Joanna Strycharz (University of Amsterdam) to discuss their article, "Advertising Professionals' Views on Advertising Seemingly Related to Offline Conversations," coauthored with Rongjin Zhang (University of Minnesota), published in the March 2026 issue of JAR. Claire and Joanna explain conversation-related advertising: the widespread consumer belief that phones and smart devices are listening to offline conversations and serving up ads based on what was said. Drawing on a survey of 74 U.S. advertising professionals and the first study to examine this phenomenon from the industry side, they unpack a striking disconnect. Nearly all professionals agree the technology is possible, yet there is no consensus on whether it is actually happening. Those who believe it is happening point to their own experiences as consumers rather than any campaign evidence, while those who say it is not offer four concrete reasons: it isn't an option platforms let them select, it's unnecessary given how much data advertisers already have, it faces real technical hurdles, and it carries legal risk. The bigger story is an information asymmetry that has shifted from one between industry and consumers to one between advertisers and the platforms themselves, with professionals often unsure what data actually powers their own campaigns. The practical takeaway for advertisers is that perceptions matter even when the practice isn't real: consumers who believe an ad came from an overheard conversation react negatively, so greater transparency about data collection, more internal conversations within agencies, and possibly regulatory mandates are needed. Our discussion also digs into how the project began with student examples in the classroom, the challenges of recruiting busy (and sometimes skeptical) advertising professionals, and a rich future research agenda spanning why consumers hold this belief, how to inform the large group sitting on the fence, and whether reactions differ across product categories. Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1080/00218499.2025.2531594 To keep up to date on the latest JAR news sign up for our newsletter:  https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/su/mtD04QN And follow us on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/82528291/admin/

  8. Jul 23

    An Investigation of How and Why Organizations Enact Greenhushing

    Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we speak with Nayla Khan (University of Portsmouth), Marta Nieto-García (Universidad de Salamanca), and Diletta Acuti (University of Bath) to discuss their article, "An Investigation of How and Why Organizations Enact Greenhushing," coauthored with Giampaolo Viglia (University of Portsmouth), published in the March 2026 issue of JAR. The authors explain what greenhushing is: the strategic decision to downplay or stay quiet about genuine sustainability practices, essentially the mirror image of greenwashing. Using Booking.com's sustainability program as a third-party benchmark, they analyzed the websites and social media of 300 UK hotels and found greenhushing to be widespread: only 38% of hotels communicated their verified sustainability practices on their websites, and less than 2% of their Facebook and Instagram posts touched on sustainability at all. Interviews with 16 service marketers across hotels, restaurants, salons, and tour operators revealed two main drivers: fear of greenwashing accusations and a lack of confidence in whether their practices are "enough" to talk about. Tellingly, most greenhushing organizations also don't track their sustainability performance, which the authors argue feeds that lack of confidence. The practical takeaway is that firms with verified practices are leaving value on the table. The authors recommend tracking sustainability performance with verifiable metrics, communicating claims backed by that data, and keeping the story consistent across websites and social platforms so it reads as authentic. Our conversation also digs into the origins of the project, including a candid admission from a major grocery retailer that it deliberately stays silent on sustainability, the challenge of interviewing managers who had never heard the term greenhushing, and future directions for research on this topic. Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1080/00218499.2025.2514889 To keep up to date on the latest JAR news sign up for our newsletter:  https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/su/mtD04QN And follow us on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/82528291/admin/

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This podcast gives listeners a look at the latest research articles published in the Journal of Advertising Research. Listen to authors describe their work and what motivated it, explore challenges they faced in the research process, and describe what they'd like to researched next. 

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  • Creator
    Journal of Advertising Research
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    53
  • Rating
    Clean
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    © 2026 JAR Inside the Research Podcast
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    JAR Inside the Research Podcast