AI vs. Human

: a comparative study of visual and textual advertising effects on purchase intention

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly becoming an important part of our lives, and its recent technological advancements show no signs of deceleration. Nonetheless, as AI continues to develop at a rapid pace, it is becoming imperative to research and classify its potential impacts. This research examines the ability of AI to create effective advertisements in comparison to those created by humans within the smartphone industry. It further aims to analyze possible dissimilarities in the effect of advertisements created by AI and humans on purchase intention and brand preference under the consideration of distinct content forms within the hierarchy­of effects framework.After quantitively choosing brands as well as developing and validating the created stimuli in a focus group and interviews, the main experimental survey with eight distinct stimuli groups yielded supporting results. The findings of the research show that AI­generated advertisementscan indeed be compared to human­created advertisements in their effect on purchase intention and brand preference. Moreover, all forms of content output created by AI show no significant difference in their effectiveness compared to human­ created advertisements. Ultimately, the study suggests that AI might even be able to develop more effective advertisements than humans as technology continues to accelerate. Overall, this research provides important insights into the applicability of AI in everyday work life within the marketing industry, which can help marketers realize how AI impacts the purchase intentions of consumers and how it can be employed to mitigate possible difficulties within the traditional creative process.

Date of Award	26 Jun 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Paulo Romeiro (Supervisor)