Abstract
Contemporary society requires communication strategies that integrate different media channels in order to improve advertising performance. Currently, there are not many scientific research studies of the various mass media, comparing the results of audiovisual advertising to purely audio or visual messages aimed at detecting the best combination of media, especially from a neurophysiological perspective. This study aims to investigate the effects of previous exposure to an advertisement via radio on the consumers’ response to the same advertisement shown on television (TV) or as a banner on a website. A total of seventy participants in a between-subjects experiment watched several television commercials during the advertising break of a documentary or saw some banners during a web surfing task. Half were first exposed to the same advertisements via radio. The results have shown that participants who previously listened to the radio advertisements spent a longer time looking at the brand and had a higher engagement when watching the same advertisements on television. Moreover, they had a different kind of visual attention to the website banners. This pattern of results indicates the effect of mere exposure—that is, the exposure to a radio advertisement enhances the effectiveness of the same advertisement via television or web, offering useful insights for media planning campaigns. Even if mere exposure has been extensively studied, cross-media research is scarcely explored, whereas this study detected the effects of mere exposure in a cross-media communication strategy, showing that it can be measured through psychophysiological methods.
Highlights
Radio has the power to create pictures in the audience’s mind, stimulating them to “see” what they are listening to (Bolls 2002)
The first hypothesis predicted that participants will have a more positive response to a television advertisement if they were previously exposed to the same advertisement via radio
Previous research highlighted the role of the perception of familiarity in the development of preferences and found that prior exposure enhances the pleasure of advertisements
Summary
Radio has the power to create pictures in the audience’s mind, stimulating them to “see” what they are listening to (Bolls 2002). The ability to evoke a sort of “visual perception” while listening to an advertisement implies the possibility of engaging the listeners in visual exposure to the product. For this reason, being exposed to a radio advertisement could enhance the familiarity of the audience with the message and can affect the consumers’ reaction to the same advertisement when shown on television. At moderate levels of repetition (Cacioppo and Petty 1979) This is due to “habituation”, which is the process by which initial uncertainty or negativity towards an unfamiliar stimulus is attenuated (Robinson and Elias 2005; Vakratsas and Ambler 1999).
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