Paper Details

Name: Gagandeep Josan & B. B. Singla
Country: India

Year: 2026
Volume: Volume No: 13, Issue: 1, Year: 2026
Page Number: 331-343
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20959868

ABSTRACT
Purpose – Attitude toward advertisements is a central determinant of advertising effectiveness, yet its antecedents remain under-examined among young working professionals in emerging digital markets. Drawing on Ducoffe’s Advertising Value Model (AVM), this study examines the influence of five factors — credibility, informativeness, hedonism, materialism and privacy concern — on attitude toward advertisements (AAD) among young working professionals in northern India, and establishes their relative importance.

Design/methodology/approach – Primary data were collected from 600 young working professionals across Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh through a structured questionnaire using five-point Likert scales. The proposed model was tested using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS, following a two-stage measurement-and-structural assessment with bootstrapping (5,000 subsamples) and out-of-sample predictive validation via PLSpredict.

Findings – All five factors significantly influence AAD. Four exert positive effects — informativeness (β = 0.275) is the strongest, followed by hedonism (β = 0.258), credibility (β = 0.250) and materialism (β = 0.245) — while privacy concern exerts a significant negative effect (β = −0.200). The model explains 57.1% of the variance in AAD (R² = 0.571) and demonstrates superior predictive performance relative to a linear-model benchmark.

Research limitations/implications – The study is cross-sectional and employs purposive sampling within three northern Indian states, which constrains causal inference and generalisability. The findings nonetheless extend the AVM to a digitally engaged professional cohort in an emerging market and provide empirical grounding for privacy-calculus reasoning in this context.

Practical implications – Advertisers targeting young professionals should prioritise informational value, supported by entertainment and credibility, while adopting privacy-respectful, consent-first data practices, since privacy apprehension measurably erodes advertising attitude.

Originality/value – The study offers one of the few PLS-SEM examinations of advertising-attitude antecedents specific to young working professionals in an emerging digital market, integrating materialism and privacy concern into the classical AVM and ranking the relative contribution of each factor.

Keywords Attitude toward advertisements, Advertising Value Model, Informativeness, Privacy concern, PLS-SEM, Young working professionals