How YouTube influencers are renewing the ‘art of advertising’ - Comparing the effects of unboxing videos and official product launch videos on YouTube, on the product attitudes of Generation C consumers.

This study has investigated the effect of influencer marketing and native advertising practices, in comparison to traditional marketing and advertising techniques. Several different videos were used as research stimuli to trigger respondents to form an opinion on a product that was displayed in all videos. In order to get a complete sense of people’s product attitudes, this concept was measured with three sub-variables: brand attitude, purchase intention, and product liking. To compare the effects that exposure to influencer marketing, native advertising, and traditional marketing messages have on people’s product attitudes, an experiment with a post-test only control group design was conducted. The experiment consisted of four conditions in total: three experimental groups and one control group. Data was collected for this experiment using an online questionnaire that was distributed through the researcher’s personal network. Analyzing the gathered data through various statistical tests found that influencer marketing in the form of non-sponsored unboxing videos was not found to be better at generating more positive product attitudes than either native advertising or traditional marketing messages. Actually, the latter were found to be more effective in increasing people’s product attitudes as a whole, compared to native advertising messages. When compared to influencer marketing, traditional marketing messages were found to be better at increasing product liking and generating more positive brand attitudes. Additional variables like product owning, brand familiarity, familiarity with the videos, and YouTube usage motivations were found to also have an effect the product attitude variables. Business should according to these results not fixate on influencer marketing and native advertising, but keep designing traditional marketing messages as well, as they are found to be particularly more effective in enhancing brand attitudes and product liking. In addition, people who already own a product from the brand and people who reported to be familiar with the brand were found to overall hold more positive product attitudes. Organisations should use this information and target these people in order to further enhance their product attitudes, and perhaps use them in spreading a positive word about their brand and products. Finally, to generate the most positive product attitudes, organisations should consider the YouTube usage motivations of their target group before deciding on what type of message to use.