Attitudes towards Digital Advertisements: Testing Differences between Social Media Ads and Mobile Ads

This study aims to understand the differences between attitudes towards the social media ads and mobile ads, the most recent and rapidly growing forms of digital advertisements. Lack of academic studies in developing countries on the most rapidly growing digital advertisements creates a research gap which was aimed to be addressed in this study. Two different surveys on similar samples were carried out to understand the attitudes towards the two different types of ads. Ducoffe's advertising value model was used as the theoretical foundation. Facebook ads were used as a proxy for social media ads and mobile advertisements were presented in the form of mobile application ads. The findings indicate that overall attitudes are negative towards both the mobile app advertisements and Facebook advertisements. Among the antecedents of attitudes, the perceived entertainment of the advertisements appeared to have the strongest effect on attitudes, while credibility appeared as the second most important factor affecting attitudes.