Make It More Authentic: The Drivers of Positive Ad Evaluations in Co-created Health Communications

Abstract

The reported lack of research on consumer-to-health department interactions (Andersen et al. 2012) and the audience’s perceptions that many health campaigns greatly exaggerate health risks (Cancer Vic 2012) suggest that increased consumer involvement in the design of health messages and increased message authenticity may enhance the persuasiveness of many, limitedly successful public health campaigns (e.g., Darrow and Biersterker 2008; de Gruchy and Coppel 2008; Kerr et al. 2013). Source effects literature (Wilson and Sherrell 1993) suggests that positive message evaluations may be strengthened when the audience develops a sense of identification with the message source. Similar, audience evaluations may benefit from messages that are perceived to be more authentic, since message authenticity enables self-referencing to the scenarios depicted in the health message (Ertimur and Gilly 2012).