ABSTRACT
This study examines the effect of advertising appeal of e-commerce video advertising, especially those available on YouTube. There are three appeals that will be compared, namely rational, fear, and humour. Rational appeal concentrates on the features or the benefits of a product, fear appeal expresses a threat that may happen, and humour appeal provides a boost in positive mood to people. In this study, effectiveness of an advertisement is measured by memory and attitude. Memory is measured by implicit and explicit measurements so the effect of advertising appeal to memory can be seen as a whole. This research was of a single-factor multiple-group design. Participants were 106 students from various faculties at the University of Indonesia. The results showed that fear appeal generates a score that is significantly higher for implicit memory and advertisement attitude compared to rational and humour appeal. Meanwhile, humour appeal is the only form that significantly affects explicit memory. Therefore, it can be concluded that fear appeal has the ability to persuade consumers and influence their unconscious memory, whereas humour appeal can be used to retain consumers that are already loyal to the product or brand.
