Advertising: Company Asset or Liability? A Systematic Literature Review on Deception

Research on deception in advertising has expanded over the last 50 years, yet existing reviews focus on specific forms of deception in advertising and rarely integrate the individual, organisational and contextual factors that shape deception in advertising. This paper systematically reviews 193 publications on deception in advertising, using an integrated ADO-TCM framework. Based on the insights from the framework, this review proposes a comprehensive conceptual model that captures the interactions between consumer and brand-level processes, clarifying the pathways through which deceptive advertising operates. The review also identifies critical gaps in the literature, including the strong theoretical emphasis on the Persuasion Knowledge Theory (PKT), the limited work in non-Western contexts, the dependence on self-reported measures and the underuse of neuroscientific methods. These gaps present promising avenues for future research, such as incorporating tools like the electroencephalogram (EEG) or virtual reality (VR) to examine consumers' subconscious responses to deceptive advertising.