Cross-Media Consumption: Insights from Super Bowl Advertising

When viewers engage in cross-media consumption—view television advertising and social media posts on another medium—how do stimuli from multiple screens influence their response? To address this question, we construct a comprehensive dataset to estimate the effects of Super Bowl advertising and the advertised brands’ Facebook content on ad likability. The novel insights emerging from the analyses include that: both media directly and significantly impact the response, contributing 60% and 40%, respectively; thinking hurts liking; and an ad's serial position does not matter, which differs from the primacy and recency effects previously reported in advertising studies. This study contributes to the theory and practice by: (i) testing open research questions empirically regarding the complementary effects of two screens; (ii) extracting the formal, analytic, and narrative thinking styles from the actual words in social media comments; and (iii) demonstrating that divided attention across screens has negative consequences on viewer appraisals.