Untapped and Understudied Issues in Influencer Advertising

Abstract

Scholarly research on influencer advertising has grown explosively over the past few years. Vloggers, YouTubers, Instafamous, or bloggers, all describe social media influencers who create valuable content and/or narrate their personal lives on social media platforms to connect with followers and thus attract sponsorships from brands (e.g., Jin, Muqaddam, and Ryu 2019; Lou and Yuan 2019). Influencer advertising is quintessentially interactive, which relies heavily on the bond between influencers and followers and capitalizes on the persuasive appeal of influencers. As an evolving form of interactive advertising, influencer advertising serves as a new means for brands to efficiently ramp up return-on-investment, especially during the pandemic (Taylor 2020). Extant research on influencer advertising has paid due attention to the role of sponsorship disclosure (e.g., Evans et al. 2017), the impact of AI influencers (Thomas and Fowler 2021), the appeal of influencers among children (Boerman and van Reijmersdal 2020), influencer-follower relationship (Lou 2021), and the effect of consumers’ characteristics (e.g., social comparison tendency, compulsive buying tendency, and materialistic envy) (Jin and Ryu 2020). Recent review articles have also summarized the current themes in influencer advertising and bibliometric analysis for practical implications (e.g., Hudders, De Jans, and De Veirman 2021; Ye et al. 2021). Yet, there are still untapped or understudied issues in influencer advertising pertaining to the broad context of interactive advertising, for instance, analysis from the perspectives of influencers and/or advertising agencies, the impact of influencers in promoting prosocial behavior (e.g., mask wearing during the pandemic, getting vaccines), the effect of virtual influencers, pet influencers, children influencers, and so on. Therefore, we invite original manuscripts for this upcoming Special Issue Article Collection of the Journal of Interactive Advertising (JIA) dedicated to Influencer Advertising, within the broader domain of interactive advertising. Relevant topics and themes for the Special Issue Article Collection might include, but are not limited to: