Journal of Digital Marketing and Communication

Twitch Advertising and Purchase Intention: The Impact of In-Stream Ads on Viewer Behavior

Claudia Brauer — 2026-02-06

Twitch, a leading livestreaming platform in the D-A-CH region, combined real-time content with a highly interactive community, offering unique opportunities for digital marketing. Research on advertising effectiveness at the individual viewer level, however, remained limited. This study investigated how in-stream video and display ads influenced Twitch viewers’ purchase intentions and explored the role of ad-related and content-related factors. A survey of 204 Twitch viewers, recruited via Twitch and Reddit, assessed awareness, attitudes, and perceived effects of video and display ads, along with factors such as thematic congruence, entertainment, informativeness, and personalization. Video ads were more effective than display ads in increasing purchase intentions but were perceived as more intrusive. Across formats, thematic alignment with livestream content and content qualities such as entertainment value, informativeness, and personalization significantly enhanced ad effectiveness. The findings highlighted that both ad format and content-related factors were critical for the effectiveness of Twitch advertising. The study advanced theoretical understanding of livestream advertising by emphasizing the interplay between ad characteristics and content context and provided practical guidance for marketers to design engaging, congruent, and less intrusive campaigns.

Muslim-Friendly Tourism Facilities and Visiting Intention in Halal Tourism: The Mediating Role of Halal Certification Benefits

Evi Febriana — 2026-06-04

Driven by the rising demand for services aligned with Islamic values, halal tourism emerged as a critical segment in Indonesia's hospitality industry. This shift forced destinations to recalibrate how they operationalized religious comfort and structural compliance for Muslim travelers. While existing literature heavily explored Muslim travel behavior through the lenses of destination attributes, religiosity, and perceived value, empirical insights remained sparse regarding how tangible faith-based facilities interacted with institutional trust signals such as halal certification to shape visiting intentions. To explore these dynamics, this study deployed a quantitative research design to evaluate the impact of Muslim-Friendly Tourism Facilities (MFF) on Visiting Intention (MVI), specifically examining the mediating role of Perceived Benefits of Halal Certification (PBH). Utilizing a purposive sampling approach, data were gathered from 250 Muslim respondents and subsequently analyzed via PLS-SEM using SmartPLS 4. The empirical findings substantiated that faith-based amenities shaped visitor behavior through both direct pathways and indirect mechanisms through certification perceptions. Given that the direct link between facilities and intentions remained statistically meaningful alongside the significant indirect path, the perceived benefits of halal certification functioned strictly as a partial mediator.

Fragmented Stories, Unified Brands: How Consumers Reconstruct Meaning Across Multiple Digital Platforms

Hamdi Sadeh — 2026-04-29

Despite growing scholarly attention to fragmented brand narratives, existing research adopts brand-centric perspectives, leaving a critical gap in understanding how consumers reconstruct meaning from dispersed digital fragments. This study addresses this gap by investigating the interpretive strategies consumers employ to derive coherent brand understanding across multiple platforms. Theoretically grounded in transmedia storytelling, sense-making theory, and platform affordances, this research adopts a qualitative, interpretivist approach utilizing reflexive thematic analysis. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 25 digitally active consumers from Palestine, Jordan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, selected through purposive sampling to ensure diversity in age (21–48), professional background, and digital literacy. Findings reveal four key insights: First, consumers normalize fragmentation as an expected feature of digital branding rather than a barrier. Second, they actively engage in cross-platform sense-making through systematic cross-checking and critical evaluation of brand messages. Third, trust operates as a dynamic construct negotiated through algorithmic transparency and influencer authenticity, not as a passive brand attribute. Fourth and most significantly, emotional coherence—consistency of affective tone and values across platforms—emerges as more influential in shaping perceived brand unity than strict message consistency. This study contributes to digital branding literature by shifting focus from brand-controlled messaging to consumer-centered meaning reconstruction, offering a conceptual model that positions brand coherence as an emotional and symbolic consumer outcome rather than a managerial output. Practical implications include platform-specific storytelling that prioritizes emotional alignment over message uniformity, alongside policy recommendations for transparent algorithmic practices and influencer governance in emerging digital markets.

Inclusivity and Social Status Representation in Rucas’s TikTok Content as a Branding Strategy

Rahmadina Aulia — 2026-06-16

Despite the growing scholarly attention to TikTok as a branding platform, there remains a gap in understanding how local fashion brands construct inclusivity through visual representation of marginalized social groups—particularly informal workers. This study addresses this gap by examining @rucas.official, an Indonesian fashion brand whose transformation content has attracted 1.9 million followers and 129.6 million likes, making it a significant yet underexplored case of emotional branding through social representation. Using Stuart Hall’s encoding–decoding model, this article analyzes how Rucas constructs meanings of inclusivity and social status in transformation videos featuring waste pickers and parking attendants, and how audiences interpret those meanings. The analysis draws on visual observation of selected TikTok videos, documentary data, and public comment analysis. Findings reveal that Rucas encodes inclusivity through three structured phases: the before phase (social reality), the process phase (dignity and care), and the after phase (identity transformation through streetwear aesthetics). Audience responses reflect dominant, negotiated, and oppositional readings. The study concludes that inclusive branding on short-form video platforms can deepen emotional engagement, but must be accompanied by ethical transparency regarding consent, compensation, and long-term well-being of the subjects portrayed.

Sadvertising and Sentiment: A Lexicon-Based YouTube Comment Analysis of Emotionally Resonant Thai Insurance Advertising

Andi Azhar — 2026-05-19

Sadvertising referred to the deliberate use of melancholic and empathetic narratives as a primary persuasive strategy in marketing communication. Although the genre had become commercially prominent, large-scale empirical evidence on how global audiences received such advertisements was still limited, and most prior sentiment studies had focused on product reviews or English-language Western markets rather than emotionally driven Southeast Asian advertising. This study examined whether emotionally resonant, narrative-driven advertising in the sadvertising genre produced predominantly positive sentiment among global digital audiences. A domain-adapted, rule-based lexicon sentiment analysis framework was applied to 2,498 YouTube comments scraped from a landmark Thai Life Insurance advertisement to quantify sentiment polarity, eight emotional response typologies, and engagement metrics across an 11-year observation window. The lexicon was constructed from established resources (VADER and the NRC Emotion Lexicon), extended with 30 emoji tokens and 47 negative terms specific to emotional advertising commentary, and validated against a 300-comment human-coded reference set with substantial inter-rater agreement (Cohen’s kappa = 0.79). Positive comments constituted 38.9% of the corpus (95% CI: 37.0–40.8%) compared to 6.4% negative comments (95% CI: 5.5–7.5%), yielding a positive-to-negative ratio of 6.04:1 (95% CI: 5.11–7.13). A chi-square goodness-of-fit test rejected the equal-proportions null hypothesis at p < 0.001 with a large effect size (Cohen’s w = 0.60). Crucially, 95.3% of crying-expression comments carried positive valence (95% CI: 92.8–97.0%), with a Cramer’s V of 0.51 and an odds ratio of 51.8 (95% CI: 32.36–82.91), empirically resolving the sad–positive paradox. Positive sentiment persisted across 11 years of engagement with no detectable temporal decay, and cross-cultural consistency was observed across at least 27 linguistic communities. The findings advanced sadvertising theory and carried direct implications for brand communication strategy in the digital era.