Health Advertising on Short-Video Social Media: A Study on User Attitudes Based on the Extended Technology Acceptance Model

The rapid development of short-video social network platforms provides us with anopportunity to conduct health-related advertising and recommendation. However, so far, there areno empirical evidence on whether users are willing to accept health-related short-videoadvertisements. Here, acceptance refers to purchase intention, meaning that users will read shortvideoads, share ads with others, or even open the product link embedded in ads to purchase theproduct. In this paper, we make the first attempt to model and quantify user acceptance of healthrelatedshort-video advertisements. Particularly, we propose a new research model that enhancesthe Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) with two new designs. First, we propose four newantecedents including social interaction, intrusiveness, informativeness, and relevance into theoriginal TAM to reflect the features of short-video social networks. Second, we introduce twomediator variables including perceived usefulness and attitude so that we can better study howdifferent factors affect user acceptance of health-related short-video ads. We perform a survey onthe Internet and conduct an empirical analysis of the surveyed data. The results show that the fourantecedents as well as the perceived ease of use have significant influences on perceived usefulness,attitude, and purchase intention. Further, perceived usefulness plays a valid mediating role inattitude and purchase intention. We also found that users' perceived ease of use on health-relatedshort-video ads cannot significantly predict users' attitudes toward ads. This is a new finding insocial media-oriented ads. Finally, we integrate the empirical findings and present reasonablesuggestions for advertisers and marketers to promote health-related short-video ads.