Curbing texting & driving with advertising co-creation

Despite recent advances in technology and legislative action, texting while driving remains a major societal concern. This applied paper investigates the influence of active ad co-creation as a form of UGC that is effective at a) decreasing intentions to text while driving and b) promoting sharing of the ad with others. These effects emerge due to a positive effect of active ad co-creation on empowerment, which mediates the effects. Further, the findings indicate that partial ad co-creation is comparably effective to full ad co-creation, and collaborative (vs standard or competitive) ad co-creation can lead to even greater outcomes due to increased empowerment. Finally, we find that the positive influence of actively co-created ads wears out after about four weeks. The findings offer multiple theoretical and managerial implications within the domains of ad co-creation and UGC, especially related to boundary conditions in those areas as they relate to texting while driving.