ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses research on Internet advertising (and beyond) and its influence on consumer emotion, cognition and behaviour. It reviews research on how the Internet provides marketers with unprecedented opportunities for personalized targeting, due to the ‘digital footprints’ that consumers leave behind on the Web and the ‘big data’ revolution that has yielded the potential to analyse the huge reservoir of Internet data. We also discuss the ‘dark side’ of this targeting as exemplified by the Cambridge Analytica case. In addition, this chapter also discusses the various forms of online advertising and zooms in on the critical role of trust in fostering online persuasion. In this chapter we will argue that being online permanently may create a state of chronic cognitive load, which creates the conditions conducive of more unconscious, automatic and heuristic processes that may make consumers particularly susceptible to online advertising. In addition to discussing the ‘marketer’s toolkit’ on the Web, we also explore how more generic experiences of being online affect consumer cognition and what the implications are for online advertising.
