Impact of Deepfake Advertising Attributes on Consumers’ Hedonic & Utilitarian Values and Brand Credibility

Creative AI technologies, like deepfakes and generative adversarial networks, are making it possible to make and edit audio and video material in advertising in new ways. These new tools make it easy to make big changes to ads and create brand related positive consequences in the mind of target consumers. From a marketing paradigm, this study focused on explaining the relationship between the deepfakes Advertising attributes and brand credibility via hedonic and utilitarian value, which is underexploited empirically in an AI driven Advertising space. Thus, in order to address this empirical knowledge void, an extensive literature review was undertaken and four hypotheses were derived to explain the potential relationships. Quantitative methodology with a survey strategy was undertaken drawing an effective sample size of 229 young undergraduate consumers of Sri Lankan public universities. Furthermore, analysis was carried out using Smart partial least squares (PLS)-structural equation modelling. The study first finds a significant direct relationship between the deepfake Advertising, hedonic value and utilitarian value. It also finds significant relationships between hedonic value, utilitarian value and brand credibility. The findings shed the light on improving Advertising and marketing effectiveness through branding applications.