Balancing creative originality with strategic discipline remains a fundamental paradox in advertising creativity. Although generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can produce novel recombinations of creative elements, it may not reliably align with brand strategy and campaign-specific executional requirements. To address this tension, organizations are reconfiguring creative workflows through new forms of human-AI collaboration. Drawing on an inductive multi-case study of five advertising organizations, including an incumbent agency and an AI-native startup, this study develops the 4A Modes Framework of Human-AI Collaboration. Organized along two dimensions of AI autonomy and process embeddedness, this framework identifies four modes of collaboration: Augmentation, Automation, Agentic, and Alliance. Furthermore, we identify two evolutionary paths through which organizations systematically navigate this tension: Process Integration and Native Innovation. Across both paths, micro-ambidexterity enables practitioners and teams to flexibly switch between and recombine collaboration modes within a single production process. Overall, these findings provide a theoretical lens for understanding the structural transformation of creative production and offer practical guidance for achieving effective and sustainable human-AI symbiosis.
As generative artificial intelligence (Gen-AI) increasingly mediates product search, evaluation, and choice, consumer cognition is becoming distributed across human–AI systems. This shift challenges a largely unexamined assumption in advertising theory: that persuasion operates through cognitive elaboration within the individual consumer. Drawing on cognitive offloading research from cognitive psychology, we develop the CogOffload framework to explain when consumers delegate cognitive work to Gen-AI and what consequences follow. A seven-stage delegation continuum maps increasing levels of offloading, and a value-based cost-benefit framework identifies its antecedents and the moderators that shape how consumers weigh them. We propose three clusters of outcomes. First, offloading weakens memory for brands and product attributes while strengthening memory for AI-generated summaries. Second, it inflates metacognitive self-esteem and decision confidence, producing AI-induced overconfidence that reduces further information-seeking. Third, effects on decision quality depend on AI reliability: when AI is unreliable, verifying AI recommendations imposes cognitive and emotional costs but can restore impaired memory and recalibrate inflated confidence. Seven propositions and three long-term conjectures extend these effects to consumer autonomy, competence erosion, and brand loyalty. Together, the CogOffload framework positions advertising in the era of Gen-AI as operating within a distributed system of human and artificial cognition.
A growing body of research highlights the benefits of awe-a self-transcendent emotion that shifts attention away from the self-for outcomes such as prosociality, mental and physical well-being, and life satisfaction. Drawing from this work, consumers often seek awe-evoking experiences, and advertisers increasingly embed awe-inducing elements in their messages, including in the promotion of self-gifts-products purchased for oneself as a reward, celebration, or source of comfort. Despite its popularity in marketing, the influence of awe on consumers' desire for self-gifts remains largely unexplored. Across five studies spanning multiple ad formats, product categories, and awe induction methods, we find that awe decreases the desirability of advertised self-gifts by reducing consumers' motivation to celebrate themselves-a central driver of self-gifting. This effect is moderated by individual differences in future temporal focus and materialism: awe diminishes self-gift desirability when both are high, but not when either is low. These findings challenge the widespread use of awe in advertising and identify boundary conditions that determine its effectiveness. Our research contributes to literature on emotion, advertising, and consumer psychology by showing that awe, despite its generally positive associations, can backfire, and provides actionable insights for marketers seeking to align emotional appeals with consumer motivations in self-gift campaigns.
People use self-effacement and self-enhancement as impression management strategies to present themselves positively to others. Self-effacement involves presenting oneself modestly by de-emphasizing or diminishing virtues and accomplishments. Conversely, self-enhancement involves presenting oneself in a boastful manner by overemphasizing virtues and accomplishments. We extend this knowledge to advertising by evaluating the effects of these opposing impression management strategies in brand-related communications on branding outcomes and purchase behaviors. Across four studies, brands using self-effacing rather than self-enhancing messages elicit stronger consumer attitudes and purchasing behaviors, even in the presence of monetary tradeoffs. Perceived message-brand fit moderates these effects, such that messages aligned with the brand's identity reduce skepticism and enhance trust. Specifically, for non-luxury brands, modest, self-effacing messages are preferred, whereas for luxury brands, boastful, self-enhancing messages align with their identity and are therefore more acceptable. These findings suggest that the effectiveness of self-effacing versus self-enhancing message types depends on brand context, with non-luxury brands benefiting more from self-effacement, whereas differences between message types are attenuated for luxury brands, allowing greater flexibility in message strategy. Finally, this research highlights skepticism and brand trust as the mechanisms underlying the effects of self-effacing and self-enhancing brand messages on branding outcomes and purchase behavior.
