Matthew Pittman

University of Tennessee at Knoxville | UTK · Tombras School of Advertising and Public Relations

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts by established legacy brands are often seen as inauthentic. What can brands do to genuinely engage in CSR efforts? This study investigates internal CSR as a potential solution. CSR type (internal and external) and extrinsic cues (brand size and age) interact to affect congruence, authenticity, and subse...

Online behavioral advertising (OBA) is now the norm for social media advertising campaigns. Brands use detailed consumer data points to customize product placement, but extant research has found mixed results about the efficacy of OBA given increasing consumer privacy concerns. This research attempts to address this conflict by using the FCB grid t...

While sports fandom and social media advertising have been widely studied, and all major, professional teams use social media campaigns for direct sales, there is surprisingly little research on the relationship between fans’ social media engagement behavior (SMEB) and their purchase intention (PI), and none that differentiates PI across different...

Social media engagement requires cognitive resources, which subsequently impact the advertisements consumers see while browsing. For the most part, however, advertising practitioners and scholars still study social media ads and messages as if they will receive users’ full attention and cognition. This study has two main contributions. First, we de...

The Foote, Cone, and Belding (FCB) grid was developed to help advertising practitioners think strategically and situationally about the way consumers make purchase decisions. It was a prominent theoretical perspective for scholars in the 1980s but has been neglected in recent years. Moreover, what little research does exist on the FCB grid seems to...

This research investigates the effects of digital context on perception of green advertising. We challenge the common advertising practice of posting similar content across platforms by showing how the same ad is received differently by consumers on different digital channels. We use social norms theory (SNT) to build our hypotheses and test them w...

Digital marketing campaigns increasingly utilize social media influencers. Research in influencer marketing has investigated popularity metrics but found conflicting results on how the number of followers and likes on posts might influence consumers' behaviors. The present research investigates green living orientation of influencers as a moderatin...

How can green advertising get non-green consumers to think more about the environment? Using Elaboration Likelihood Model and Social Judgment Theory, we construct hypotheses and test them across three experiments. Results provide converging evidence that messages placed on social media with low-information and high-fear (emotional) appeals are most...

This study seeks to add nuance to the definition of binge-watching by identifying the subtypes of the general practice that reflect viewer rituals, motives, and outcomes. The two subtypes are (1) the healthy practice of ‘feast-watching’ and (2) the unhealthy practice of ‘cringe-watching’. While binge-watching as a singular behavior has been associa...

Purpose This paper aims to clarify the relationship between consumer accountability and responses to egoistic and altruistic appeals. It proposes that when consumers’ relationships with others are heightened in the form of accountability, different prosocial message appeals become effective. The study expands the understanding of how marketing may...

Brand Authenticity is paramount in contemporary advertising and brands can communicate their authenticity by supporting social and environmental crises. Brands often donate money or products to causes, and while the value of such activities has been documented, the actual nature of the donation relative to authenticity and subsequent outcomes is un...

Consumers encounter many cues when making online purchases, particularly when reading product reviews. When competing heuristics are triggered, which emerges as more persuasive? This study explores online reviews of an Amazon-like platform to see how star ratings, numbers of reviews, and review valence provide cues to consumers which influence perc...

This research investigates a novel type of fit unique to digital marketing: That between the intimacy of an advertising appeal and of the social media platform through which it is advertised. In doing so, we challenge the common marketing practice of posting identical content across platforms by showing how the same ad is received differently by co...

Extant results on the binge-watching outcomes have been mixed. This study sought to examine the crucial factor of attentiveness that might help to enhance viewer experience and mitigate post-binge regret, as well as differentiate the motivation of narrative transportation from narrative completion. While narrative transportation involves a viewer g...

Increasing numbers of marketers are turning to the crowd—members of the public engaged with brands via the Internet—to develop marketing and advertising campaigns. Some marketers use social media to connect directly with customers, while others use crowdsourcing agencies to harness the power of crowd labor. As more members of the public become awar...

The purpose of this study is to explore the how user perceptions of social media might influence effects on psychological well-being. Social Presence Theory was used to examine Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and texting. Undergraduate students (N = 352) were given a survey to assess how frequently they use social media, how intimate they th...

"Binge-watching" represents a radical shift for twenty-first century media consumption. Why do people select this method of television viewing? A survey administered to 262 television binge-watchers identified factors that influence binge watching, several of which are somewhat different than factors impacting other types of television viewing. Fac...

This article uses the television series Dexter as a space to explore the practice of religion in a secular society. Employing critical discourse analysis, which focuses on the causal relationships between discursive practices or texts and sociocultural processes, we situate the habitual killing activity of protagonist Dexter Morgan in what Charles...

Social networking services like Twitter have changed the way people engage with traditional broadcast media. But how social is "second screen" activity? The purpose of this study is to determine if patterns of connected viewing (augmenting television consumption with a second screen) and co-viewing (watching television together) are different for t...

This study explores the relationship between social media attitudes and behaviors and loneliness among college students. The study looks at the interaction of loneliness with three popular social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram), as well as how often those students create and/or consume content within each platform. A survey admin...