Emotional Spillover from News Content to Branded Advertising on Instagram: The Moderating Role of Topic Involvement

Instagram advertising appears within algorithmically curated feeds where sponsored messages may follow emotionally charged news content. Building on excitation transfer theory, this study examines whether the valence of preceding news affects responses to a sponsored post and whether topic involvement moderates this effect. A preregistered between-subject experiment exposed Italian Generation Z users to a simulated Instagram feed containing positive or negative news, followed by the same branded post. Self-reported outcomes were combined with behavioral traces recorded through a custom interface. Preliminary results show no uniform effect of feed valence. Among highly involved users, however, the negative feed produced less favorable attitudes toward the ad, lower purchase intention, and weaker self-reported engagement than the positive feed; the effect did not extend to actual behavioral engagement. The study shows that advertising effectiveness depends not only on message characteristics but also on the emotional context created by surrounding platform content.