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Sequel advertisements, although used often in practice, are not well studied in literature. This study aims to define sequel advertisements, investigate their effectiveness on customer attitudes towards ads/brands and identify key elements leading to their effectiveness.

The authors first conduct a field study using Facebook data to show that sequels are more effective than non-sequels and repeat ads. Study 2 experimentally tests recall and brand attitudes of sequels over new advertisements, Study 3 tests the effectiveness of different character retention and plot extension variations in sequels and Study 4 experimentally establishes the cognitive path that leads to greater effectiveness of sequel advertisements.

Sequel advertisements are more effective on consumer recall and brand attitudes as compared to new or repeat advertisements, with message format of the first advertisement moderating the effectiveness of the sequel. Consumers’ recognition of the prior-sequel connection mediates the effectiveness of the sequel advertisement. Plot extension with character retention is the most effective sequel advertising strategy.

This research opens opportunities for research on the effectiveness of sequels across different media formats/product categories and sequential ads.

The findings suggest that managers can profitably adopt a strategy of narrative ad followed by a sequel that extends the plot while retaining the characters.

The authors define sequel advertisements, describe the process mechanisms leading to greater effectiveness of sequels and identify superior sequel advertising strategies.

Misinformation is notoriously difficult to combat. Although social media firms have focused on combating the publication of misinformation, misinformation accusations, an important by-product of the spread of misinformation, have been neglected. The authors offer insights into factors contributing to the spread of misinformation accusations on social media platforms.

The authors use a corpus of 234,556 tweets about the 2020 US presidential election (Study 1) and 99,032 tweets about the 2022 US midterm elections (Study 2) to show how the sharing of misinformation accusations is explained by locomotion orientation.

The study findings indicate that the sharing of misinformation accusations is explained by writers' lower locomotion orientation, which is amplified among liberal tweet writers.

Practitioners and policymakers can use the study findings to track and reduce the spread of misinformation accusations by developing algorithms to analyze the language of posts. A limitation of this research is that it focuses on political misinformation accusations. Future research in different contexts, such as vaccines, would be pertinent.

The authors show how social media firms can identify messages containing misinformation accusations with the potential to become viral by considering the tweet writer's locomotion language and geographical data.

Early identification of messages containing misinformation accusations can help to improve the quality of the political conversation and electoral decision-making.

Strategies used by social media platforms to identify misinformation lack scale and perform poorly, making it important for social media platforms to manage misinformation accusations in an effort to retain trust. The authors identify linguistic and geographical factors that drive misinformation accusation retweets.