Spillover Effects of Brand Safety Violations in Social Media

Abstract This research examines how a brand’s ad adjacency to offensive content influences consumers’ perceptions, emotions, and behavioral intentions toward the brand. Varying the type of offensive content, we conduct two experiments to demonstrate how offensive association (OA) between social media content and the brand’s ad increases negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) intentions. The two studies show that the seemingly accidental association with offensive content leads NWOM intentions via heightened blame attribution and negative emotions. The results suggest that even a brand’s inadvertent association with offensive content can induce consumers to believe that the brand implicitly approved or overlooked its ad placement. Furthermore, the negative spillover effects of brand safety violations are found only when the perceived ad intrusiveness is high. The present research provides advertisers with the rationale behind their need for being vigilant in safeguarding their ads and sponsorship.