ABSTRACT
Digital ad spending has been constantly growing in the United States, and advertisers are increasingly allocating larger budgets to social media. Success on social media is largely attributed to coincidental efforts and trial-and-error. Therefore, a theoretical discussion of the processes associated with social media advertising is critically important. Much social media advertising practice, while relying on strategic thinking processes, is the result of considerable trial-and-error. The nature of social media— how accessible, cheap, and easy-to-use they are— has shifted industry standards in terms of the strategic ad production processes. Among the multiple information processing models, the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) and the heuristic systematic model (HSM) have been widely adopted in advertising research. The premise of ELM and HSM is that processing of persuasive messages often occurs in two distinctive ways: activating either the central route or the peripheral route processing.
