Liu-Thompkins, Yuping, Ewa Maslowska, Yuqing Ren, and Hyejin Kim (in press), “Creating, Meta-Voicing, and Propagating: A Road Map for Understanding User Roles in Computational Advertising,” to appear in Journal of Advertising. [Download Full-Text PDF]
Abstract: Over the last two decades, everyday users have become a prominent force in the advertising landscape. They actively participate in conversations with and about brands, by creating, amplifying, and interacting with brand-related messages. These user activities generate large volumes of structured and unstructured data, which advertisers can mine to understand consumer interests and preferences. In this paper, we survey insights from the user-generated content literature through the computational advertising lens to offer a roadmap for future research. Specifically, we discuss three roles that users play as creators, meta-voicers, and propagators. For each role, we present the key research areas that can benefit from a computational approach, identify the opportunities and challenges, and propose questions for future research. We also discuss the practical implications of applying computational methods to study users and user-generated content for advertisers.