Attitude Toward the Ad (Trustworthiness) (ATAD-T)

1. Abstract

The Attitude Toward the Ad (Trustworthiness) (ATAD-T) scale is a four-item, seven-point Likert-type psychometric instrument designed to quantify consumers' perceptions of credibility, authenticity, and epistemic reliability regarding promotional communications. Adapted by Lawrence, Fournier, and Brunel (2013) from the foundational Ad Believability Scale formulated by Beltramini (1982), the ATAD-T isolates the cognitive and evaluative dimension of trustworthiness within the broader nomological network of general attitude toward the advertisement ($A_{ad}$). The scale was refined in the context of a multi-method investigation examining the psychological mechanisms through which consumer-generated advertising (CGA) diverges from traditional company-created advertising (CCA) in influencing consumer judgments. Operating across a seven-point continuum anchored from strongly disagree to strongly agree, the ATAD-T evaluates the extent to which an audience considers an advertisement truthful, believable, sincere, and dependable. Psychometric evaluations demonstrate robust internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha coefficients typically exceeding .88 to .93), clear unidimensionality through confirmatory factor analysis, and strong convergent validity with downstream relational outcomes such as brand trust, brand attitude ($A_b$), and behavioral purchase intentions. Furthermore, the scale demonstrates rigorous discriminant validity against adjacent constructs, including advertising entertainingness, aesthetic liking, and general consumer skepticism. By isolating perceived trustworthiness from affective ad liking, the ATAD-T offers researchers and practitioners an empirically rigorous measurement tool for testing source credibility, persuasion knowledge activation, and message authenticity across digital, participatory, and traditional advertising landscapes.

2. Keywords

Attitude Toward the Ad, Advertising Trustworthiness, Ad Believability, Source Credibility, Consumer-Generated Advertising, Persuasion Knowledge Model, Epistemic Trust, Advertising Authenticity, Psychometrics, Measurement Invariance

3. Authors

The ATAD-T scale adaptation was formulated and validated by:

• Benjamin Lawrence, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, Carroll School of Management, Boston College (formerly at Boston University). Expertise in consumer behavior, digital media strategy, and collaborative consumption.
• Susan Fournier, Ph.D. — Allen Questrom Professor and Dean, Questrom School of Business, Boston University. Renowned authority on brand relationships, brand equity, consumer-brand identification, and qualitative/quantitative methodology.
• Frédéric F. Brunel, Ph.D. — Associate Dean and Professor of Marketing, Questrom School of Business, Boston University. Specialist in consumer psychology, word-of-mouth communication, design thinking, and advertising effectiveness.

The instrument draws conceptually and operationally from the prior foundational scholarship of Richard F. Beltramini, Ph.D. (Emeritus Professor of Marketing, Wayne State University), who developed the original 10-item semantic differential Ad Believability Scale.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Attitude Toward the Ad (Trustworthiness) scale is to provide an exacting, parsimonious, and methodologically robust measure of the perceived credibility, truthfulness, and reliability of commercial messages. Historically, broad operationalizations of attitude toward the ad ($A_{ad}$) conflated affective valence (e.g., pleasant, entertaining, humorous) with cognitive appraisals of veracity and integrity. The ATAD-T was developed to untangle these distinct dimensions, focusing strictly on epistemic judgments: whether the consumer evaluates the narrative, visual, and informational elements of an advertisement as genuine expressions of reality versus manipulative, hyperbolic, or deceptive corporate rhetoric.

In academic research, the ATAD-T serves as a pivotal mediator within experimental and field paradigms examining persuasion dynamics. Specifically, the scale was deployed by Lawrence et al. (2013) to capture how variations in perceived source identity—contrasting everyday peer consumers against profit-driven corporations—alter persuasion trajectories. As marketing environments have decentralized through Web 2.0 architectures, peer-to-peer recommendations, influencer sponsorships, and user-generated content, consumers increasingly apply critical cognitive filters to detect underlying motives. The ATAD-T enables researchers to measure the exact point at which source attributions translate into message acceptance or message rejection.

From an applied and managerial perspective, the ATAD-T addresses critical needs in copy testing, brand safety audits, and regulatory compliance evaluations. Conventional advertising metrics frequently prioritize engagement, viral reach, or immediate positive affect. However, high levels of emotional entertainment can coexist with severe deficits in perceived trustworthiness, generating transient attention at the expense of long-term brand equity. By implementing the ATAD-T during pre-market testing, marketing analysts can determine whether experimental creative treatments successfully instill credibility or inadvertently trigger consumer skepticism and source derogation. The tool is equally valuable in non-profit, public health, and political campaigning domains, where audience adherence to informational appeals depends almost entirely on perceived communicator trustworthiness.

5. Psychological Construct

The ATAD-T operationalizes advertising trustworthiness as a specialized cognitive appraisal construct nested within social cognition and consumer psychology. Within this framework, perceived trustworthiness is defined as the recipient's subjective assessment that the claims, depictions, and emotional appeals conveyed in an advertisement are honest, dependable, objective, and reflective of actual product or service performance. Rather than capturing passive message comprehension, the construct captures active epistemic validation—the degree to which an individual accepts the communicative act as a reliable basis for forming beliefs and guiding behavior.

The construct encompasses three interlinked psychological dimensions:

• Perceived Veracity (Truthfulness): The foundational cognitive judgment regarding the objective factual accuracy of the message. This dimension reflects the consumer's belief that the advertisement avoids deceptive omissions, factual distortion, or unsupportable hyperbole. In contrast to objective truth, which is verifiable by external benchmarks, perceived veracity represents an experiential, subjective reality formed via heuristic and systematic information processing.
• Perceived Sincerity (Benevolence and Motive Attribution): The degree to which the creator of the advertisement is perceived as having honest, transparent, or pro-social intentions rather than exploitative, purely self-serving commercial motives. In consumer-generated advertising contexts, sincerity reflects perceived uncorrupted expression, where peer creators are viewed as sharing authentic experiences without corporate co-optation.
• Perceived Authenticity (Experiential Realism): The degree to which the execution, narrative, and aesthetic style of the advertisement align with lived human experience. High authenticity ratings occur when consumers perceive the creative execution as genuine, unvarnished, and representative of real-world contexts, as opposed to synthetic, overly polished, or scripted corporate staging.

The theoretical boundaries of the ATAD-T cleanly delineate it from general affective attitude toward the ad ($A_{ad\text{-aff}}$). A consumer may judge an advertisement as exceptionally creative, enjoyable, visually stunning, and emotionally uplifting while concurrently rating it as fundamentally untrustworthy and uninformative. Conversely, an utilitarian, austere informational bulletin may receive modest scores on artistic liking but exceptionally high ratings on trustworthiness. Preserving this conceptual bifurcation is vital for avoiding the halo effects that frequently obscure standard single-construct advertising evaluations.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the ATAD-T is situated at the intersection of three major psychological theories: Source Credibility Theory, the Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM), and Attribution Theory.

Source Credibility Theory

Originating from the seminal work of Hovland, Janis, and Kelley (1953), Source Credibility Theory posits that the effectiveness of persuasive communication is heavily governed by two core dimensions: perceived expertise (the communicator's competence and capability to make valid assertions) and perceived trustworthiness (the communicator's perceived motivation to state what they believe to be the truth). The ATAD-T adapts this classic communicator-centric construct into a stimulus-centric evaluation. Because modern advertisements often embody complex, distributed sources (combining brands, actors, directors, influencers, and user-creators), the message itself becomes the focal object of trust evaluation. The scale measures the receiver's deduction of communicator integrity as materialized within the finished commercial artifact.

The Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM)

Articulated by Friestad and Wright (1994), the Persuasion Knowledge Model provides the foundational behavioral mechanism underpinning the ATAD-T. The PKM asserts that consumers develop intuitive, personal knowledge about the tactics, goals, and strategies that marketers use to influence them. When persuasion knowledge is activated, consumers detach from passive reception and adopt a coping orientation, critically scrutinizing the communicative agent's motives. In traditional corporate advertising, persuasion knowledge activation routinely induces skepticism, as audiences recognize the underlying commercial intent to drive sales. In consumer-generated advertising, by contrast, the identification of a fellow consumer as the creative originator attenuates defensive coping responses, dampens psychological reactance, and elevates ATAD-T evaluations by framing the message as peer sharing rather than manipulative corporate intervention.

Attribution Theory

Kelley's (1973) Covariation Model and broader attribution principles explain how individuals attribute causal explanations to observed communicative actions. When evaluating an advertisement, consumers implicitly ask: Why was this message constructed in this specific manner? If the claims are attributed to an external cause—such as a corporate marketing budget aimed at extracting financial gain—the message is discounted via the discounting principle. However, if the positive claims about a brand are attributed to intrinsic enthusiasm or genuine customer satisfaction (as is common with consumer-generated content), consumers infer internal, authentic causality. The ATAD-T directly quantifies the outcome of this causal attribution process, registering high scores when discounting is minimized and authenticity attributions prevail.

7. Validity

Empirical assessment of the ATAD-T demonstrates robust psychometric validity across multiple evaluative paradigms, including laboratory experiments, field studies, and cross-sectional consumer surveys.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is substantiated by significant, positive correlations with conceptually aligned downstream relational variables. In the experimental evaluations conducted by Lawrence et al. (2013), perceived ad trustworthiness loaded distinctly and demonstrated strong convergent associations with overall brand evaluations ($r = .58$ to $.67, p < .001$) and consumer purchase intentions ($r = .49$ to $.56, p < .001$). Confirmatory factor analytic investigations reveal that Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values consistently surpass the conventional .50 threshold (frequently registering between .68 and .76), indicating that the four items capture substantially more common trait variance than random measurement error.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been demonstrated against adjacent but theoretically distinct promotional dimensions. Using the Fornell-Larcker criterion, the square root of the AVE for the ATAD-T systematically exceeds its inter-construct correlations with advertising entertainingness ($r \approx .31$), artistic execution ($r \approx .28$), and ad-evoked humor ($r \approx .22$). Furthermore, modern heterotrait-monotrait (HTMT) ratio analyses between ATAD-T and generalized ad liking yield values safely below the conservative .85 benchmark, proving that the scale captures an epistemic evaluation distinct from general positive affect.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

The scale exhibits robust predictive and nomological validity within experimental designs manipulating communicative sources. Lawrence et al. (2013) demonstrated that the ATAD-T serves as a significant mediating variable between ad provenance (consumer-generated vs. company-created) and consumer behavioral intentions. Specifically, when identical creative concepts were framed as consumer-generated rather than company-produced, ATAD-T scores increased significantly ($F(1, 184) = 14.28, p < .001$), subsequently predicting elevated willingness to recommend the brand. When controlling for general affective liking, the trustworthiness dimension retained independent, statistically significant explanatory power over brand loyalty indices, affirming that perceived integrity contributes unique variance to persuasion outcomes.

8. Reliability

The ATAD-T demonstrates high internal consistency and measurement stability across diverse demographic cohorts, product categories, and promotional media formats.

Internal Consistency Metrics

Across the multi-method studies presented in the primary literature, the scale exhibits consistently high Cronbach's alpha ($lpha$) coefficients:

• In the baseline calibration studies: $\alpha = .91$.
• In comparative experimental manipulations of high vs. low source disclosure: $\alpha$ ranged from $.89$ to $.93$.
• In consumer evaluations across experiential versus utilitarian product classes: $\alpha = .88$ and $.92$, respectively.

Composite Reliability (CR) metrics derived from structural equation modeling procedures closely mirror these values, consistently exceeding .90, well above the psychometric standard of .70 recommended for empirical research. Corrected item-to-total correlations for each of the four items routinely surpass .72, indicating that all indicators contribute uniformly to the underlying target latent variable without redundant or idiosyncratic distortion.

Temporal Stability and Precision

While the ATAD-T is predominantly utilized in cross-sectional, post-exposure experimental paradigms where dynamic state judgments are recorded, test-retest assessments within controlled two-week interval re-exposure protocols have revealed intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) ranging between .78 and .84. The standard error of measurement (SEM) remains low across the distribution, confirming that the scale provides high measurement precision, particularly within the mid-to-high ranges of the continuum where subtle variations in credibility critically inform consumer choice.

9. Factor Analysis

The dimensional structure of the ATAD-T has been thoroughly vetted using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Structure

Initial principal components and maximum likelihood exploratory factor analyses conducted on post-exposure response datasets consistently yield a single-factor solution based on the Kaiser-Guttman criterion (eigenvalue $> 1.0$). The primary factor accounts for between 68% and 77% of the total variance across datasets. Scree plot inspections demonstrate an acute inflection point following the first factor, confirming clear unidimensionality. Factor loadings for all four indicators are uniform and exceptionally strong, typically ranging from .81 to .91, with negligible cross-loading phenomena.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Model Fit Indices

When evaluated within structural equation modeling environments (e.g., AMOS, Mplus, lavaan), a unidimensional CFA model demonstrates exemplary fit with observed empirical data. Representative structural fit indices obtained from multi-sample validation cohorts include:

• Model Chi-Square ($\chi^2$): $\chi^2(2) = 3.42, p = .181$ (statistically non-significant, reflecting excellent correspondence between model-implied and observed covariance matrices).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $.997$ (far exceeding the $ge .95$ target).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $.992$ (far exceeding the $ge .95$ target).
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $.032$ (90% Confidence Interval: $[.000, .078]$), safely beneath the $.06$ boundary for good fit.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $.014$ (well below the $.08$ cutoff).

Multi-group confirmatory factor analyses (MGCFA) have further confirmed full metric and scalar measurement invariance across experimental conditions (e.g., across CGA vs. CCA conditions) and respondent gender groups, ensuring that mean-level differences reflect genuine latent construct variations rather than differential item functioning.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the ATAD-T instrument are summarized below:

• Instrument Designation: Attitude Toward the Ad (Trustworthiness) (ATAD-T).
• Original Conceptual Progenitor: Ad Believability Scale (Beltramini, 1982).
• Adaptation Authors: Benjamin Lawrence, Susan Fournier, and Frédéric F. Brunel (2013).
• Test Type: Self-administered psychometric rating scale; post-exposure cognitive appraisal instrument.
• Item Count: 4 items.
• Response Format: Seven-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 to 7:
• 1 = Strongly Disagree
• 2 = Disagree
• 3 = Somewhat Disagree
• 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree (Neutral)
• 5 = Somewhat Agree
• 6 = Agree
• 7 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Procedure: The composite ATAD-T score is computed as the unweighted arithmetic mean of all four completed items. Alternatively, within structural equation modeling frameworks, factor score weights may be extracted from standardized CFA parameters:
• $\text{Score}_{\text{mean}} = \frac{\sum_{i=1}^{4} X_i}{4}$
• Theoretical score range: 1.00 to 7.00.
• Higher aggregate scores indicate higher perceived trustworthiness, truthfulness, and authenticity of the promotional communication.
• Administration Time: Approximately 60 to 90 seconds.
• Target Population: Consumers, experimental research participants, and general adult audiences capable of evaluating digital, print, or broadcast promotional messaging.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The ATAD-T was published in its standardized format in 2013 within the peer-reviewed scholarly article "When Companies Don't Make the Ad: A Multimethod Inquiry into the Differential Effectiveness of Consumer-Generated Advertising" in the Journal of Advertising (Volume 42, Issue 4, pages 292–307). The theoretical foundation originates from Beltramini's 1982 work.

In accordance with standard academic publishing conventions, the conceptual framework and scale adaptations published in the Journal of Advertising (published by Taylor & Francis on behalf of the American Academy of Advertising) are accessible for non-commercial, academic, and scientific research under fair dealing/fair use standards, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is formally cited. Commercial applications, including proprietary advertising pre-testing platforms, corporate copy-testing suites, or syndicated market research tools, may be subject to institutional copyright licensing protocols governed by the publishers or the original authors. Researchers seeking specialized permissions or modified implementations should contact the corresponding author, Dr. Benjamin Lawrence, or the copyright clearance desk of the American Academy of Advertising / Taylor & Francis Group.

12. References

• Beltramini, R. F. (1982). Advertising believability: Conceptualization and measurement. In J. H. Summey, L. M. Capella, R. D. Taylor, P. S. Ellen, & J. C. Histand (Eds.), Progress in Marketing Theory and Practice (pp. 1-4). Southern Marketing Association.
• Beltramini, R. F., & Evans, K. R. (1985). Assessment of student attitudes toward advertising: A search for the 'student dimension.' Journal of Advertising, 14(2), 34-41. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.1985.10672944
• Friestad, M., & Wright, P. (1994). The Persuasion Knowledge Model: How people cope with persuasion attempts. Journal of Consumer Research, 21(1), 1-31. https://doi.org/10.1086/209380
• Hovland, C. I., Janis, I. L., & Kelley, H. H. (1953). Communication and persuasion: Psychological studies of opinion change. Yale University Press.
• Kelley, H. H. (1973). The processes of causal attribution. American Psychologist, 28(2), 107-128. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0034225
• Lawrence, B., Fournier, S., & Brunel, F. (2013). When companies don't make the ad: A multimethod inquiry into the differential effectiveness of consumer-generated advertising. Journal of Advertising, 42(4), 292-307. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2013.829533
• MacKenzie, S. B., & Lutz, R. J. (1989). An empirical examination of the structural antecedents of attitude toward the ad in an advertising pretesting context. Journal of Marketing, 53(2), 48-65. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224298905300204
• Obermiller, C., & Spangenberg, E. R. (1998). Development of a scale to measure skepticism toward advertising. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 7(2), 159-186. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327663jcp0702_03

13. Items of the Scale