Social media political advertising: A gender-based attitudinal analysis

Abstract

Informativeness, entertainment and irritation are key factors in determining people’s attitudes toward social media political advertising (SMPA). The more informative, entertaining, and less irritating an advertisement is, the more likely it is to positively influence people’s attitudes toward it. Even though there are studies which have been conducted in the past on the role of gender in advertising evaluation, but the picture is still not clear in the context of political advertising. In order to address this issue, the present research is conducted to investigate the impact of these belief factors on attitude towards SMPA among different genders. According to the results of this study, females can lead to a more favourable attitude towards SMPA in the context of informativeness than for males, and entertainment can help form a more favourable attitude towards SMPA for males than for females. However, females are more likely to be irritated by SMPA than males. Findings, Conclusion, and limitations are discussed followed by suggestions for future research.