New Media Advertising Exposure: A Poisoned Apple? An Empirical Study on The Effects of Social Media Advertising on Life Satisfaction in Adolescents

Nowadays, the second most common thing for adolescents to do, apart from sleeping, is devouring media content, which shows an exorbitant quantity of advertising. This is very worrisome, as adolescents are very vulnerable due to them transitioning through a turbulent time in life, and previous research has shown that traditional media advertising has, among other things, detrimental effects on self-esteem, body image, objectified body consciousness and life satisfaction. The occurrence of these effects is explained by the social comparison theory, the cultivation theory, and the body-objectification theory. There is reason to believe that these effects are also caused by new media advertising, which in this research was narrowed down to social media platforms with advertising. Moreover, effects might even be stronger due to the penetration of such media in normal life and the emphasize on visuals, editing options, and like buttons. However, to date there is scarce research investigating this issue. Therefore, the first research question in this research was: ‘What are the effects of social media advertising exposure on adolescents’ self-esteem, body image, objectified body consciousness, and life satisfaction?’. Furthermore, this research investigated whether new media advertising literacy buffered the effects of social media advertising, as previous research showed advertising literacy can be used as a cognitive defence against negative advertising effects. Therefore, the second research question was: ‘Does social media advertising literacy mitigate unintended advertising effects in adolescents?’ The research questions were answered with a quantitative research method, namely a self-report survey. This self-report survey was sent to parents of a high school in the Netherlands and posted in a KLM Crew Facebook page, which resulted in 159 valid responses from adolescents between 16 and 18 years old. Subsequently, (hierarchical) multiple regression analyses were used to analyse the results. Results showed that social media advertising, measured by social media exposure, only significantly predicted objectified body consciousness, while self-esteem, body image, and life satisfaction were not significantly affected. Furthermore, new media advertising literacy only moderated the effects on self-esteem significantly, and not the effects on body image, objectified body consciousness and life satisfaction. However, the significant effect was not as expected, considering that new media literacy functioned as a buffer under low social media exposure circumstances, and as a catalyst under high social media exposure circumstances. In conclusion, the detrimental effect of social media advertising was small and only present with objectified body consciousness. Therefore, this research provides no ground for concerns relating to unintended new media advertising effects. However, what is worrisome is the exponential amount of use of (social) media, which was once again confirmed in this research, as this could lead to severe negative psychological consequences. Hence, it is important to start regulating or mediating the amount of media use of adolescents. Similarly, new media advertising literacy, as measured in this study, is an ineffective buffer for negative advertising effects. All in all, learnings from this research could be implemented in other forms of media, in order to diminish detrimental negative unintended advertising effects of such media as well.