Peer or expert? The persuasive impact of YouTube public service announcement producers

Abstract

To promote prosocial concerns and call attention to social problems, public service advertising practitioners are increasingly trying to involve laypeople in creating and delivering persuasive campaign messages. An emerging media channel for these efforts is websites that feature user-generated content (UGC), particularly the video-sharing website You Tube. However, despite this trend, little is known about the extent to which a public service announcement (PSA) video will be more effective depending on who produced it. Accordingly, this study empirically tests the degree to which the persuasive impact of a video differs depending on whether the producer is a layperson or an expert. We draw theoretical rationales from several areas to compare the impact of a perceivably similar producer and an expert producer on attitudes towards video, issue importance and behavioural intention. We also analyse how issue involvement moderates these producer effects. Implications for consumer educators, policy makers and marketers are discussed with specific reference to social media.