A typical consumer is exposed to more than 5,000 advertisements per day (Story 2015) by exposure to around 500 advertising messages before ending breakfast (Marshall, 2015), and it is impossible for consumers to remember most of the advertisement images and messages. Thus, one consistent yet not thoroughly investigated question for advertisers is how advertisers draw consumers' attention by differentiating their brand from competitors' brands. One suggestion from academia is making more "creative" advertising (Dahlén et al., 2008; Lehnert et al., 2014; Rosengren et al., 2013; Smith et al., 2008). However, it is still questionable the exact meaning of "advertising creativity," and the effects of creative advertising on consumer evaluation have not been fully investigated the effects of creativity in advertising evaluation by considering various boundary conditions. The objective of this research is to redefine advertising creativity, to understand how advertising creativity shapes consumers' evaluation, and how these effects are moderated by the different types of boundary conditions, such as industry category, by analyzing more than 100,000 advertising images and copies using a cutting-edge transfer learning technique. The results of the transfer learning algorithm indicate that both cognitive dimensions (e.g., novelty of image) and affective dimensions (e.g., awe and coolness) simultaneously affect the consumers' perception of the advertising creativity, and the current algorithm enables to detect of creative advertising image with 92% accuracy rate.

Social media have emerged as one of the most important tools for firms to engage customers (e.g., Chandrasekaran et al., 2022; Cheng & Edwards, 2015; Lee et al., 2018; Wedel & Kannan, 2016). Within the tourism industry, scholars have investigated the role of social media communication in various contexts, such as online travel information search (Xiang & Gretzel, 2010), sharing travel experiences (So et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2022) and establishing positive customer relationships (Jamshidi et al., 2021). Insights into which social media content makes for generating positive engagement are, however, still largely based on marketers’ intuitions or focusing on message factors of social media posts such as message appeals (e.g., Wang & Lehto, 2020). It also often neglects the importance of the visual component of social media posts, and only a few research have investigated the effects of the image in social media on the travel industry (e.g., Fusté-Forné, 2022). The objective of this research is, therefore, to understand how textual features and image features generate user engagement in social media utilizing cutting-edge transfer learning techniques and to propose how these features should be customized to maximize user engagement for online travel shopping companies. We collect and analyze more than 10,000 Instagram posts from three online travel shopping companies, including Expedia, Priceline, and Kayak. The results from transfer learning algorithms utilizing 24 features, such as the number of people in the image, emotions expressed in the people in the image, hue, and RGB value, successfully predict the level of engagement measured by the number of likes and comments.