Middle-East Journal of Scientific Research 16 (3): 319-330, 2013 ISSN 1990-9233 © IDOSI Publications, 2013 DOI: 10.5829/idosi.mejsr.2013.16.03.11659 Determinants of Consumer Attitude Towards Social-Networking Sites Advertisement: Testing the Mediating Role of Advertising Value 1 Masood Ul Hassan, 2Seerat Fatima, 2Amara Akram, 3Javaria Abbas and 3Amna Hasnain 1 Department of Commerce, Bahauddin Zakariya University, P.O. Box 60800, Bosan Road, Multan, Pakistan 2 Department of Commerce, Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, Pakistan 3 Institute of Management Sciences, Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, Pakistan Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to scrutinize the attitude of university students towards advertising on social-networking sites (SNS). The study examined how infotainment, credibility, irritation along with personalized product, price and promotion content affect the value generated through social-networking site's advertisement (SNA) and how the value generated mediates the relationship between the antecedents and the consumer’s attitude towards SNA. A deductive, quantitative research approach was adopted, where data was collected using a questionnaire administered to a sample of 310 university students. The results showed that consumers take SNA as infotaining, credible and do not consider it as irritating. They enjoy the personalized content of product, promotion and price of SNA. They have more of advertisement value and shows positive attitude towards SNA. Advertisement value have found to mediate relationship between infotainment, credibility, irritation and consumers’ attitude towards SNA, but fails to mediate personalized product, price and promotion content. Managers need to build mutually satisfying long-term relationships with key constituents in order to earn and retain their business. Manager should develop the proper strategies for being socialized on social-networking sites. The paper enables marketing managers to assess how to utilize the newer media in order to generate value for consumers and get maximum long-term benefits for the company. Key words: Social networking sites advertisements value Social media Advertising new products and customer support at much faster speed than ever [4]. The possibilities of leveraging social media as a marketing vehicle seem endless [5]. As the increase in popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter is on a constant rise, new uses for the technology are constantly being observed. Marketers are relentlessly chasing the places where a majority of their consumers hangs out. Digital lifestyle of such consumers, powered by smart phones and net books, describes where they spend most of their waking hours and how they view brands online [1]. These social networking media has opened the door to a million possibilities for marketers [6, 1]. Marketers have started using these media to reach their customers in a more personalized way [7]. In doing so, the companies are creating online communities and INTRODUCTION The digital revolution has intensely galvanized firms’ ability to target customers through tailored advertisements. The rapid advancement in technology is making it harder for marketers to predict in advance the availability of innumerable media to use for direct communication with consumers [1]. The importance of this direct communication cannot be undervalued as the insight gained through such communications help marketers to understand consumer trends [2, 3]. To some degree, there is an emergent trend exists within web savvy consumers to get digital influence. Such cult of influence is made possible through trendy media such as social media. These emerging media can be relied to develop Corresponding Author: Attitude towards SNS advertisement Masood Ul Hassan, Department of Commerce, Bahauddin Zakariya University, P.O. Box: 60800, Bosan Road, Multan, Pakistan. Tel: +92-061-9210071-74, E-mail: masood@bzu.edu.pk. 319 Middle-East J. Sci. Res., 16 (3): 319-330, 2013 aggressive outreach programs [8, 9]. Social media can evangelize its benefits to the entire organization. Due to this reason, most of the organizations have not only developed a company website but also have a Facebook page to foster a blistering number of personal connections with their customers. Compared with traditional media, social media such as Facebook provide better opportunity to offer more personalized and interactive messages [10, 11]. As Facebook has reached up to 1 billion active monthly global users, one cannot ignore it as an attractive medium for marketing [12]. Facebook is the marketing trifecta: fast, free and ubiquitous. Currently, there is found to be a stream of researches on Social networking sites (SNS). In these researches, the scholars have questioned how these sites can use advertising to attain greater numbers of their users [13] and also studied how SNS can best advertise their products [14]. While understanding consumer behavior in general is still an ongoing problem, the behavioral impact of the new media is even less well-understood [15]. A marketer needs to encourage the communication open with consumers so that they may understand how to impart real value for their consumers. As such marketing is all about creating value for everyone [1]. The study of advertising value can add to our understanding of how advertising works, a key dimension of which would be the worth of advertising to consumers [16]. Despite a lot of work done on the effectiveness of advertising media, the impact and significance of social media on the marketing outcomes is yet an under-researched area [17]. This study is therefore aimed at investigating the factors influencing advertising value and in turn, how it enhances our understanding of favorable or unfavorable attitudes toward SNS advertising. To understand the motives behind increased advertising value that eventually forms the shape of positive attitude of consumers towards SNS advertisement, the uses and gratifications (UandG) theory is found useful. U and G theory was first developed in research on the effectiveness of the radio medium in the 1940s and has since been applied to explain psychological motives and consumers' value generations from various mass media such as television, electronic bulletins and wired or wireless Internet [18, 19 and 20]. U and G theory investigates the perspective of users of certain media about their respective effectiveness [21]. The investigation of consumers' perspectives of SNS advertising value can thus be viewed as an extension of UandG theory. Fig. 1: Conceptual Model of Consumer Attitude towards SNS Advertisement Following Ducoffe [22] and Wright [23] who have applied U and G theory on web advertising, we also posit that the dimensions such as information, entertainment, irritation and credibility are relevant equally to the social media. The scholars are convinced that digital advertising content should clearly communicate online store information to users such as brands, prices and promotions [24, 25]. Keeping in view this assertion, there is a need to examine how some of the influential dimensions primarily associated with traditional metrics, such as sales, prices, brand, etc. are becoming more significant to social media marketers [26]. Personalization of such content dimensions can help to get improved attitude towards the social networking sites [27]. Specifically, this study investigates that how the respondents' attitudes toward social-networking site's advertising is affected by personalized product, price and promotion contents, in addition to factors (information, entertainment, irritation and credibility) proposed by prior studies [16, 18, 25, 28, 29]. Following the previous researches [19, 30, 31] in this study, informativeness and entertainment are integrated into a single construct (infotainment). The model of this study as shown in Fig. 1 is based on the premise that the perceived infotainment, irritation and credibility of SNS advertisement along with personalized content of product, price and promotion, all influence the way consumers evaluate them. The attitude toward advertising is modeled as the consequence of advertising value. Precisely the key research questions of this study are: (1) what factors influence the perceived value of SNS advertisement? (2) How does perceived advertising value influence consumer attitudes toward SNS advertisement? (3) Does the advertising value mediate the relationship between perceived infotainment, irritation, credibility, along with personalized content of 320 Middle-East J. Sci. Res., 16 (3): 319-330, 2013 product, price, promotion and consumer’s attitude towards SNS advertisement? To this end, this research contributes to the marketing literature by developing a conceptual framework, linking the relationships between the antecedents with the effects of SNS advertisement. is amplified when the users starting feeling as if the SNS advertisers are trying to be over smart and manipulating their personal information for their own advantage. This way, the advertisers lose their credibility, especially when the users suspect that the advertisers are trying hard to befriend them [42]. Therefore, irritation they feel about these ads may lead the consumers to decrease the ad value. As a result, this study further proposes: Hypotheses Development Perceived Infotainment: The entertainment value of a social-networking site is also an important factor for using it [9, 32]. Entertainment leads people to consume, create or contribute to the brand-related content online [33]. Entertaining ads - ads that are perceived to be fun, exciting, cool and flashy - do have a positive effect on attitude toward the ads, attitude toward the brand and the desire to return to the website [34]. Hence, if a brand post is entertaining, brand fans’ motivations to participate or consume the content are met. Information-seeking is an important reason for people to use social-networking sites [32]. It also encourages them to participate in a virtual community [35, 36]. Furthermore, the motivation to search for information explains why people consume brand-related content [33].In short, if a brand post contains information about the brand or product, then the brand fans’ motivations to participate or consume the content are met [15]. Additionally, research shows that people tend to have positive attitudes toward informative ads on social networks [15, 34]. Information and entertainment values are usually entwined with each other in the new technological world [19, 30 and 31]. Therefore brand fans might have more positive attitudes toward infotaining advertisements, thus leading to higher advertising value. This leads to the following hypothesis: H2: The irritation felt as a result of SNS advertisement is negatively associated with perceived SNS advertisement value. Perceived Credibility: Ad credibility refers to the extent to which consumers perceive the message in the ad to be believable and is based largely on "the trust a consumer places in the source of that particular ad" (i.e. the credibility of the advertiser [43]. Social media allow for the uncoupling of credibility and authority in a way never possible before [44]. Credibility is seen as relative to the social context in which information seeking is pursued and credibility judgments are made [45]. Various media perception and selection researches have come up with mixed results. Some studies have found traditional media as more credible than internet and web [46], others have found the opposite results [15] and some of the studies even have discovered no difference in consumer perception of various media regarding credibility [47]. Over all, the digital place is considered as credible for those who rely on the web for seeking variety of information [18]. Generation Y (also known as millennials) belongs to the group which is highly dependent on web sources for searching variety of information, as this is the generation who has grown up with the growth of the technology [48]. So they are quite different from any prior generation. They are comfortable with collaborating and sharing information online [48]. They do not have any doubt regarding the message credibility and place high value of such information and message source [44]. This of course has profound implications for social media advertisements as well. The credibility perceptions of the social networking sites advertisement is hypothesized to have a positive effect on ad value that in turn influences attitude toward the SNS advertisement. Thus this study further hypothesizes: H1: The perceived infotainment of SNS-advertising is positively associated with perceived advertising value. Perceived Irritation: Recent researches show that social-networking sites hold 23% share of online advertising [37]. They have an enormous amount of private data of their users therefore can easily present tailored advertising. Though this personal content of advertisement available on these sites is attractive, but it might be seen as creepy, especially when the users take these ads as intrusion into their personal space [38, 39]. Teenagers suspect that the commercial online social-networking sites are trying to intrude into their private spaces, deterring them to spend their leisure time with their own way [40, 41 and 42]. The aforesaid situation H3: The perceived credibility of SNS advertising is positively associated with perceived advertising value. 321 Middle-East J. Sci. Res., 16 (3): 319-330, 2013 Personalized Product/Brand Content: The value and meaning of the brand itself will assist consumers in judging the merits of the product. The emerging latest technologies have helped companies to respond vigilantly to customer's complaints, give proper feedback and tailor the products and services according to the needs of the consumers. Brand pages of SNS allow unique identification of product and help to distinguish them from competitors. Marketers communicate intensively about brands to consumers whom in turn learn more about the products [26, 49]. Unlike traditional advertisement, the SNS advertisement can add many eyes catching, enchanting attributes in the advertisements which employ personalized design to draw consumer attention [50]. Customers allowed specifying their attribute preferences in selecting products are found to be more satisfied [49]. Becoming the fans of brand pages, the consumers tend to be loyal to that brand and become eager to get more and more information regarding that brand [51]. The consumers become emotionally attached to that brand as well [52]. Due to high social-networking site's advertisements contain personalized information about consumers' preferred interactivity of social media; brand effect also plays an important role [53]. If brands, they can improve consumer acceptance and brand loyalty, which in turn, helps to increase perceived value of the advertisement. Hence, in this regard this study hypothesizes: Consumers are more contented if they are open to describe their attribute preferences [49]. Personalizing products gives consumers feel of being empowered; hence the value of such products is amplified [55]. Customers often pay extra for the products they feel more valuable [56]. If a company seriously takes the feedback from the consumers and tails the product attributes, it adds great value for the consumers and there is found to be a clear change in their attitude towards these advertisements, for instance. They ignore the price of the product [50]. Hence, this study draws next hypothesis: H5: The personalized price related content of SNS-advertising is positively associated with perceived advertising value. Personalized Promotion Content: With the advancement in information technology, there are ample avenues of opportunities for marketers to use the internet for promotion. Promotion helps to increase product awareness, persuade consumers to purchase that product and give reminders to ultimate consumers [45, 46]. The latest technologies such as web 2.0 allow marketers to encourage active participation from their target customers [48]. In such pattern, the consumers are co-creator with the marketers. It makes the consumers active participant. This participation always proves meaningful advancement for the marketer because the consumer is always considered as a heart of promotional strategy [26, 57]. Customer developed promotional tactics are more useful to increase the value of product in the minds of consumers. It also helps them to get the desired attitude as they become more of a brand loyal and increase their purchase intension. Such promotional strategy has more potential to resonate with their brand fans (consumers) on SNS. The effectiveness of SNS advertisement increases when the consumer comes across the promotional activities which actively involve the consumers on brand fan pages. This element plays a pivotal role when designing SNS advertisement [24, 54]. Hence, this study concludes the next hypothesis: H4: The Personalized product/brand related content of SNS-advertising is positively associated with perceived advertising value. Personalized Price Content: Like brand related content, the price-related content should also be prominent on these brand pages. Clear price information helps to attract more consumers [24, 54]. Price is an important consideration when a consumer undergoes for decision making regarding product choice. Prices related promotional activities favorably affect the consumers’ desire to purchase the products. Clear display of prices and the related sales promotions strikes the attention of the consumers and motivates them positively to check the SNS advertisements. If they find these attractive, they take purchase action after viewing that message. Participation in the personalization process makes consumers feel more comfortable which helps to evangelize their experience with SNS advertising into hedonic one. This process is highly subjective in nature. H6: The personalized promotion content of SNSadvertising is positively associated with perceived advertising value. Mediating effect of Advertisement Value: Exchange is a central process of marketing: the theoretical hub around which marketing theories connect to form an integrated 322 Middle-East J. Sci. Res., 16 (3): 319-330, 2013 structure [48]. Exchange involves the passing of value to each party [58]. An effective advertising message can be viewed as a potential communication exchange between advertiser and consumer [22]. In addition to the effectiveness of digital advertising in terms of revenues, advertising value is a perceptual measure to evaluate the intangible effectiveness of the advertising campaign from the consumer’s point of view. Advertising value is a measure for advertising effectiveness [22]. The exchange of value is beneficial to the advertiser only when the consumer’s expectations are met or exceeded [48]. Personalization can provide marketers the opportunity to reach their potential customers in a very individual way which will increase and strengthen the relationship with the consumers [25, 59]. Marketers can access the demographic information collected by wireless providers and use it for sending relevant messages and promotions to the consumer which may increase response and enhance the company’s image [24]. By this way, the advertising can offer bundles of benefits to their targeted customers. This is very much clear that gratification attained through various attributes along with personalization offered in advertisements increases the value of the bundles of benefits gained by product or services. This value is found to affect the attitudes of the consumer towards advertisements [29]. Consumers are highly persuaded by those advertisements for which they have favorable attitude [60]. Thus, consumers’ favorable attitude towards SNS advertisement gained through high value achievement encourages them to accept SNS advertisement. Henceforth we can hypothesize that not only perceived value of advertisement is positively associated with their attitude towards SNS advertisement but also mediates the relationship of certain determinants with their attitude towards advertisement. So this study finally hypothesizes: generally asked over a statement w hich is based on a 5-point likert scale. This Likert scale ranges from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree. The first part of the survey obtains the personal data about the respondent. The subsequent part includes the qualification form to ensure if the respondent actually uses the social-networking sites or not. Only the SNS users can proceed further to respond to the survey. The most important hub in the third part of the survey questionnaire consisted of many questions regarding major dependent, independent and mediating variables of the study. Items for infotainment, irritation and advertising value are mainly derived from modified version of [16] scales for advertising on the World Wide Web. The credibility scale was based on modified version of MacKenzie and Lutz [43] scale for advertising credibility and the scale used to measure attitudes toward SNS advertising was based on Alwitt and Prabhaker [61] scale, which measured consumer attitudes toward television advertisements. To suit the unique requirements of the current research setting and address the unique nature of social media sites, new items were being included in the scales mentioned earlier. These new items are generated when the researchers of the study mobilized discussion on the online platform to check the cogency of the scales and consulted little more prior literature [42, 47], after which they come up with few more items for each of the above-said variables. The scholars used and authenticated such as technique while conducting quantitative research [62, 63]. No matter the researcher is going for initial instrument development or even adapting existing instrument, in both cases, if the targeted population is different from the previous researches, then it is necessary to identify appropriate items for inclusion in the present study [62]. Engaging these populations as focus group participants can provide an efficient means for the purposes of both item generation and refinement [63]. By this way, the researcher was able to solicit insight and perspectives spanning the issues regarding subject area. This process also helped to develop multi scale item for remaining three variables too, which were measured using multi-item index scales. Finally, this study came up with 35 assenting statements to explore the depth of the phenomenon. This was then pretested with a separate group of respondents to enhance its overall design. The results disclosed need for very minor changes in the questionnaire due to ambiguous wording. The opening section of the questionnaire was comprised of clear definition and brief explanation of SNS advertising. H7: A consumer's perception that advertising has a high value is positively associated with their attitude toward SNS advertising. H8: Perceived Advertising value mediates the relationship between infotainment, credibility, irritation, consumer focused product, price, promotion content and attitude towards SNS advertisement. MATERIALS AND METHODS Scale Development: The study consists of the survey included the 35 problem statements. Respondents were 323 Middle-East J. Sci. Res., 16 (3): 319-330, 2013 Table 1: Demographic Information of Respondents Sample and Data Collection: To get the answer of the above-mentioned research questions and hypotheses, quantitative research methodology was adopted. Data was collected from non-random sample of university students at a Pakistani Institution. The primary reason for selecting these students was their accessibility but mainly because of the reason they belong to generation that is grown up in the technological age. There was a clear cut eligibility criterion to qualify as a respondent of the study. The start of survey questionnaire contains five questions. If the respondents do not use Facebook, they were politely asked to leave the survey. A total of 400 questionnaires were distributed within qualified respondents, of which 320 were returned and deemed valid for data analysis, representing a response rate of 80 per cent. Bernard [64] suggests that a valid response rate for face-to-face surveys, as were used here, are approximately 80 per cent. As shown in Table, 1, the majority of respondents was males (60 per cent). 50 per cent students had graduate degree means they are currently studying at a post graduate level. Similarly, as shown in Table 2, the respondents can easily be categorized under heavy users of SNS as 58 per cent of them use their SNS profiles multiple times a day. The 40 per cent participants had between 500-1,000 Facebook friends. This number is significant; the average user on the site only has 130 friends [12]. Furthermore, 58 per cent respondents have liked average 51-100 fan pages. The above-said statistics may indicate that the participants in this survey are more active on the site and know more fellow “Facebookers” than the average user [42]. N Percentage Gender Male Female 186 123 59.6 39.4 Qualification Undergraduate Graduate Post Graduate MPhil PhD 141 156 5 2 5 45.2 50.0 1.6 0.6 1.6 Table 2: Social-networking sites usage Mean S.D SNS Usage Rate (N=306) Hardly Ever Few Times a Month Few Times a Week Daily Multiple Times a Day 4.34 2.2 % 2.9 % 12.2 % 24.0 % 58.3 % .956 Number of Friends(N=306) Less than 100 101-500 501-1000 1001-1500 Above 1500 1.5161 58.3 % 40 % 3.5 % 1.0 % 1.6 % .75774 No. of Brand Page Likes(N=306) 1-50 51-100 101-500 >500 1.7264 11.9 % 58.3 % 17.0% 7.7 % 1.02318 variable to explain a factor [66]. Thus, nearly all the dimensions initially proposed by the researcher were represented, so the validity of the initial scale was established. Following factor analysis, the data were checked for reliability using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient. Table 3 a and, b clearly stated the items' loadings and respective reliability statistics (Cronnbach Alpha) of each variable. As shown in Table 3 (a-b) the results of this test revealed that majority of the scales used to measure the independent variables, mediating and the dependent variable, presented acceptable levels of reliability i.e. greater than 0.700 [67]. Data Analysis Validity and Reliability Analysis: Before performing correlation and regression analysis and checking mediation effect, all measurement scales were gone through principal component factor analysis with varimax rotation. Field [65] suggests that this is an appropriate method for checking the validity of questionnaire items. The results of the factor analysis revealed that all items used to measure Irritation, Credibility, Personalized Product Content, Personalized Price Content, Personalized Brand Content, Advertisement Value and Consumer attitude towards SNS advertisement loaded substantially (>0.40) on the extracted factor and all Items used to measure infotainment loaded substantially (>0.30) on the extracted factor. So all the extracted factors are under the range of generally accepted minimum factors loading as it depicts at least 10 per cent variance for a subsequent Correlation Analysis: All seven hypotheses were initially tested using a series of simple correlation analyses. Table 4 presents the descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) for all variables included in the analysis of this study data, as well as the full correlation matrix. The significant Pearson’s correlation coefficients (r) values (P<.001) among all the study variables show preliminary that the entire hypotheses are proved. 324 Middle-East J. Sci. Res., 16 (3): 319-330, 2013 Table 3 a: Factor Analysis and Reliability results for Independent variables Factor Component Factor loading Credibility C1 0.950 C2 0.949 C3 .946 C4 0.525 Irritation Irr1 0.827 Irr2 0.796 Infotainment Info1 0.621 Info2 0.793 Info3 0.636 Info4 0.601 Info5 0.397 Personalized Product Content PPro1 0.624 PPro2 0.609 PPro3 0.560 PPro4 0.412 PPro5 0.410 PPro6 0.400 Personalized Price Content PPri1 0.853 PPri2 0.852 PPri3 0.706 PPri4 0.698 Personalized Promotion Content PPm1 0.738 PPm2 0.725 PPm3 0.657 PPm4 0.587 PPm5 0.476 Eigen Value 3.316 Table 3 b: Factor Analysis and Reliability results for mediating and dependent variable Factor Component Factor loading Advertising Value AV1 0.821 Av2 0.803 Av3 0.784 Attitude towards SNS advertisement ATA1 0.787 ATA2 0.739 ATA3 0.688 ATA4 0.645 ATA5 0.544 ATA6 0.447 Table 4: Correlation matrix for key variables Variables Mean S.D 1.Infotainment 3.80 .715 2.Credibility 3.36 .658 3.Irritation 2.85 .951 4.Personalized Product Content 3.53 .531 5.Personalized Price Content 3.35 .856 6.Personalized Promotion Content 3.23 .727 7.Ad value 3.71 .751 8.Attitude towards SNS Advertisement 3.46 .698 Notes: Correlations are based on n=310; *p, 0.05; * *p, 0.01 1 1.00 .291** -.252** .447** .235** .257** .467** .486** % of variance 12.280 Cronbach’salpha 0.873 1.861 6.891 0.746 2.567 9.506 0.688 2.122 7.858 0.700 3.144 11.645 0.842 2.577 9.545 0.729 Eigen Value 1.934 2.551 % of variance 64.481 Cronbach’s Alpha 0.723 42.518 0.719 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 1.00 -.072 .663** .095 .240** .477** .421** 1.00 -.199** .066 .067 -.199** -.161* 1.00 .255** .379** .469** .600** 1.00 .392** .234** .462** 1.00 .206** .505** 1.00 .519** 1.00 Regression Analysis and Tests for Mediation: In order to study the extent of impact of independent variables on dependent variable and to test the mediating effect of advertisement value, multi-step regression analysis was carried out. Results of mediation tests, following the steps recommended by Baron and Kenny, [68] are presented in Table 5. For mediation to be valid, three conditions must be fulfilled. The first condition is that the independent variable must affect the mediator. The second is that the independent variable must affect the dependent variable. The third is that the mediator variable must affect the dependent variable. These three conditions with the help of multi-step regression analysis can be examined from Models 1, 2 and 3 as shown in Table 5. In the first step of 325 Middle-East J. Sci. Res., 16 (3): 319-330, 2013 Table 5: Regression Analysis and Test of Mediating Effect of Advertisement Value Dependent Variable Step 1 Independent to Step 2 Independent to Step3 Independent to Dependent variable (Attitude towards SNS Ad) Mediating variable Dependent variable in the presence of Mediating variable(Ad Value) Infotainment Irritation Credibility Personalized Product Content Personalized Price Content Personalized Promotion Content .284** -.091*** .217** -.087 .275* .105 -.027 .076 Conclusion .133* -.071 Partial Mediation Full Mediation Hypothesis 1 Supported Hypothesis 2 Supported .052 .257*** -.008 .237*** Full Mediation Fail Hypothesis 3 Supported Hypothesis 4 Not supported .235*** .279** .250*** .273** Fail Fail Hypothesis 5 Not supported Hypothesis 6 Not supported Ad Value R Square .313 .561 .195*** .588 Adjusted R2 Standard Error .292 .57019 .548 .46052 .573 .44992 Hypothesis 7 Supported --*p, 0.05; * *p, 0.01, ***p <0.01 Table 6: Tests for checking mediation effect of perceived Ad Value Independent Variables Infotainment Credibility Irritation Personalized Product Content Personalized Price Content Personalized Promotion Content Sobel Test --------------------------------t-value p-value 2.6227244 2.41391625 -1.35653867 0.81885371 1.40790244 -0.38219734 Arion test ---------------------------t-value p-value 0.00872298 0.01578209 0.17492784 0.41286988 0.15915996 0.70231499 2.57779789 2.36374203 -1.31003371 0.78762497 1.36029993 -0.3669665 regression analysis, the impact of all independent variables is studied on mediating variable that is advertisement value. The model’s adjusted R² is.292 and the F value (14.716) is significant (P< 0.001) depicting that the variation in advertisement value is explained up to 29% through variation in independent variables. In the second step of regression analysis, the impact of independent variables is studied on dependent variable that is the attitude towards advertisement. The model’s adjusted R² is.548 and the F value (40.945) is significant (P< 0.001) depicting that the variation in attitude towards SNS advertisement is explained up to 55% through variation in independent variables. In the third step of Regression analysis, the impact of independent variable is studied on dependent variable in the presence of mediating variable. The model’s adjusted R² is.573 and the F value (37.756) is significant (P< 0.001) showing that independent variables account for 57.3% variation in the dependent variable in presence of mediating variable. Perceived ad value fully mediates the effect of Credibility and Irritation on attitude towards SNS advertisement as coefficients of these variables are significantly (p value of coefficients ranges from <.001 to <.05) related to perceived ad value, but not related to attitude towards SNS Advertisement. Perceived Ad value partially mediates the effect of Infotainment on attitude towards SNS advertisement value, indicated by the coefficients decreasing from.22 to.13, in the presence of 0.009 0.018 0.190 0.430 0.173 0.713 Conclusion Hypothesis 1 supported Hypothesis 2 supported Hypothesis 3 supported Hypothesis 4not supported Hypothesis 5not supported Hypothesis 6not supported perceived Ad value but still significant in nature as shown in step3 of Table 5. Hence, hypotheses 1 to 3 are supported by the data. The mediation tests for perceived ad value on personalized product, price and promotion content dimension reveals a different picture. Perceived Ad value does not mediate the effect of all three personalized product, price and promotion content dimension, indicated by all three variables not having a significant effect on perceived ad value. This implies that perceived ad value does not mediate the effects of these antecedent variables on attitude towards SNS Advertisement. Consequently, hypotheses 4 to 6 are unsupported. These results indicate that personalized product, price and promotion contents are the principal drivers of attitude towards SNS advertisement, unmediated by perceived ad value. As suggested by [68], this study also conducted Sobel Test to further support the mediation model. This test helps to diagnose the effect of mediating variable (Perceived Ad value) in directing the effects of independent variables to the dependent variable (Attitude towards SNS advertisement). Under this test, a significant p-value indicates support for mediation. Finally, the classic Aroian (1944/ 1947) test of mediation was also used to further verify the results. All of these tests also supported our results gained through regression analysis as the results are shown in Table 6. 326 Middle-East J. Sci. Res., 16 (3): 319-330, 2013 smart move from company let consumers feel exciting and help built the brand’s fun and adventurous reputation. Such as smart companies are adopting a heedful approach of making products reflect well on their consumers by creating a fan page which facilitates the consumers to build and communicate their opinions. Such moves proved to be strategic in nature, as they let the people feel to enjoy, involved and important, in other words, it improves their self-image. Because getting feedback from the company makes consumers feel good about them. This high sense of self-worth is what the sole purpose behind socializing on SNS because consumers enjoy these tailored-to-me offers. This also helps to generate the smartest loyalty building move from the consumers that shows their neutral attitude is changed to favorable one which in turns helps to plumb the depths of the company’s potentials. Social media can said to be natural extension to traditional customer services. If the customers find more ways to contact you, they are more satisfied with the company as it shows that they are being listened. Now if the company’s DNA is not dedicated to listen and respond in time, no technology can provide solution for this problem. The consumers are getting more demanding as they spent most of their waking time online so they want instant gratification. Social media cannot be seen as panacea, it is a catalyst for fresh thinking for improving customer service in this digital age. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION This study contributes to the understanding of six antecedents that influence the perceived value of advertising: infotainment, irritation, credibility, personalized product content, personalized price content and personalized promotion content. Among these six factors, the links between infotainment, irritation, credibility and the perceived value of advertising were supported. Study strongly supported the first three hypotheses, i.e. all three variables instead of having direct impact do leave an impact on the attitude towards SNS advertisement via ad value. When consumers believe that SNS advertising is credible, informative, entertaining and trustworthy, they tend to have favorable perceptions about the value of advertising. Providing information is one of the most important functions of advertising. Entertainment establishes an emotional link with customers and a brand message and is thus an important factor to enhance ad value. The products those have many entertaining responses from SNS users such as comedic talk, repartee and parodies seem to be more successful than others. In a competitive market place, advertisements need to be interesting and enjoyable to catch audiences' attention. This has been proven a successful strategy to introduce the stigmatized products through these virtual outlets. This seems to be consistent with some previous studies on advertising [19, 31 and 69]. Next, the perceived value of advertising was found to be the most important determinant of consumers' attitudes towards advertising. Contrary to first three variables, all three of the personalized content dimensions i.e. product, price and promotion content fails to support their mediating relationship with attitude towards SNS advertisement through perceived ad value, but the direct link to attitude towards advertisement is strongly supported. Uses and gratification theory has speculated different interactive factors along with media content may inflict significant direct influences on consumer's attitude towards and their ultimate acceptance of diverse media like television, social-networking sites, cell phones, etc. When people want to improve their self-image, there are greater chances of accepting advertising. As they feel advertising is essential part of whole community and they accept it as a normative behavior [70]. Especially teens have proven to be fervent conversationalists. Straddling childhood and adulthood, they communicate frequently with a variety of important people in their lives. For this purpose, social-networking sites provide an effective platform. Any Managerial Implications: With the help of our study’s findings, the brand manager can learn the tactics to effectively utilize brand-related activities such as various sales promotions’ announcements or many other marketing tools. It also increases the manager’s understanding of the brand-related attitudes of the consumers. Similarly, it also helps them to understand how to improve brand’s image to affect the attitude of consumer positively, hence increase their purchase intension. The findings of this study may be very helpful to persuade potential customers, especially when the customer spends most of his or her time on such sites. To reach the millions of customers who thrive online throughout a day and night, company needs different type of thinking and some courage. Problem can arise for managers when the company does not have enough resources to handle the avalanche of brand posts. But the benefits of using this channel undermine some of these hiccups. Marketing managers need to take customers as their best advocates. Social media can be an ideal forum for CEOs to describe 327 Middle-East J. Sci. Res., 16 (3): 319-330, 2013 customers their candid viewpoint. The best strategy for effectively utilizing social media tools can be to establish a level of trust and build relationship with the consumers. The change in the consumers preferences requires new thinking on the part of the manager about how to (or if to) use one of the newer media and a sound understanding of how consumers are using the Web to collect information and how this impacts their decision-making processes. There are many success stories about usages of SNS as medium of interaction but at the same times, it also speculates some notable failures too [1]. The failure factors contribute to people ignoring advertising due to information over load, mistrust and boredom. The major mistake many marketers are making is utilizing these social media without developing proper strategy [1]. Marketers need to understand new technologies were being developed, not for giving power to the marketers, but for empowering consumers [71, 72]. 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