The Effect of Placement Context on Brand Persuasiveness: An Abstract

Abstract

This empirical study extends the existing advertising literature to explore the effect of humor in less conventional advertising, product placement. Product placement, or the integration of branded information in media content, has been extensively studied in the past three decades. However, the context of product placement is comparatively under researched. Product placement context refers to the circumstances under which a brand was placed. Previous content analyses have shown that product placement tends to be largely associated with humorous elements (La Ferle & Edwards, 2006). Humor has been shown to influence traditional advertising (Eisend, 2009), but its effect within embedded advertising has yet to be systematically examined. In addition, most previous studies were conducted in Western cultures (e.g., US and the European countries). This study accounts for this gap by studying general consumers in a Chinese context and explores the effect of humor on the persuasiveness of placed brands.