Psychological Effectiveness of Interactive Advertising in Russia

Purpose. The investigation was aimed to check the hypothesis that the interactive advertising is more effective than usual one. As the criteria of psychological effectiveness of advertising we allocated trust to advertising and active personal position.  So the hypotheses were that during perceiving the interactive advertising the respondents show: 1) the higher level of trust; 2) the higher level of "active personal position".

Design/Methodology. 109 respondents were tested online. The control group consisted of 59 people, and the experimental group consisted of 50 people. The experiment included three stages: 1) the respondents viewed the advertising in two variants: a) interactive advertising for experimental group; b) usual advertising for control group; 2) the respondents answered the questionnaire which included the questions about attitudes to the advertising and associations about advertising, the technique of A.Kupreychenko “The trust / distrust of person to other people, the world, yourself” and the scale of psychological effectiveness of advertising elaborated by A.Kupreychenko; 3) 12 people were interviewed to get more information.

Results. The hypotheses were partially confirmed. We have shown that there is no difference in the level of trust to the interactive advertising as compared with the non-interactive one, but the respondents perceive it more personally, are involved into the interaction with the characters, and act as if it were the reality. We can conclude that the psychological effectiveness of interactive advertising is higher.

Limitations. It remains to be tested if the results will be the same for another countries and cultures.

Research/Practical Implications. The results can be used in the development of advertising products for Russian consumers.

Originality/Value. The study is the first attempt to investigate the trust to interactive advertising among Russians. The theoretical value is caused by using trust and active position as the criteria of psychological effectiveness of advertising.