Does format matter? The impact of interactive annual reports on retail investors

Annual reports have evolved from statutory financial documents into strategic communication instruments. Beyond meeting regulatory requirements, companies increasingly design them to address broader, more heterogeneous audiences, shifting from static PDFs to interactive HTML formats. This shift is potentially consequential for the growing group of younger retail investors. Despite their lower financial literacy, they are expected to face fewer obstacles in understanding annual reports, as the interactivity of the HTML format provides a more vivid, approachable, and easier-to-engage-with presentation of the company and its performance. Nevertheless, it remains underexplored how the report format shapes these audiences’ perceptions of the report and the company. Drawing on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), this study examined how two formats of the same annual report (PDF vs. HTML) affect young, non-professional investors’ perceptions of the report and the company, as well as their subsequent behavioral intentions. The study used a between-subjects design with 106 participants and collected data using eye-tracking and a survey. The results show no significant difference in how participants evaluated the company or their subsequent behavior after exposure to the annual report, comparing both formats across the general sample. However, the format significantly redistributed participants’ visual attention. Format effects on reading time and investment intentions emerged, albeit tentatively, only among readers with comparatively lower financial literacy within the sample: the interactive HTML format increased willingness to invest, without affecting the underlying evaluation of the investment. The findings indicate that interactive formats shape the reading process rather than persuasive outcomes, and that their influence, where present, is strongest among readers with comparatively lower financial literacy who may therefore have more difficulty critically assessing complex financial content. For investor relations, this positions format design as a question not only of accessibility but also of responsibility, as interactive reporting may engage and motivate less financially literate audiences, which raises the question of whether this engagement is matched by a corresponding depth of processing.