Advertising Executions Research Articles

Assessing the Imagination Scale’s Nomological Validity: Effect of Hedonic versus Utilitarian Product Types and Abstract versus Concrete Advertising Execution

This research builds on a study of advertisement-evoked imagination scale developed by Dewi and Ang (2015). The imagination scale contains four types of imagination, that is, benefit-anticipatory imagination, emotional-bonding imagina­tion, symbolic imagination, and mind-wandering imagination.In this paper, the pro­po­sed constructs of the imagination types are related to other relevant constructs exis­ting in marketing literature.The purpose of this research is twofold. First, it establishes the nomological validity of the imagination measures by placing it in the context of hedonic-utilitarian concepts proposed by Holbrook and Hirschman (1983). Second, the research empirically studies the effect of situational factor, that is concrete versus abstract advertisement execution, on imagination elicitation. The study is an experiment which employs mixed factor design involving eight sub-groups of participants. Results of the research demons­trate the nomological validity of the imagination scale where the four types of imagination were elicited in response to hedonic/utilitarian product depicted in the ad and situational factors (that is, abstract versus concrete ads).

Moderating effects of prior brand usage on visual attention to video advertising and recall: An eye-tracking investigation

For advertisers, attracting attention to video marketing stimuli is paramount to building and refreshing consumers' brand memories and increasing their propensity to purchase. Research has demonstrated brand users are more likely to recall advertising, possibly suggesting a brand's commercials draw more attention from current users than potential new customers. Testing whether prior brand usage moderates the effect of visual attention on recall, infrared eye-tracking collected fixation data from nearly 700 participants across 64 video advertising executions. The results indicate that brand users and non-users can give similar levels of visual attention: what matters is how the effectiveness of this attention differs across the two groups. Prior brand usage moderates the effect of visual attention on recall; light and non-users giving more attention have better recall. However, this effect does not exist for heavier users. These findings highlight the importance of developing advertising to gain visual attention from potential customers.

Disclosing Instagram Influencer Advertising: The Effects of Disclosure Language on Advertising Recognition, Attitudes, and Behavioral Intent

ABSTRACTIn this study we examined the effect of disclosure language (control/no disclosure, “SP,” “Sponsored,” and “Paid Ad”) in Instagram-based influencer advertising on ad recognition, brand attitude, purchase intention, and sharing intention among a sample of 237 students. In line with prior research, results indicated that disclosure language featuring “Paid Ad” positively influenced ad recognition, which subsequently interacted with participants' memory of a disclosure and mediated the effect of disclosure language on attitude toward the brand and sharing intention. The findings offer a significant contribution to the literature on consumers' information processing and understanding for new and developing native advertising executions. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

Predicting advertising execution effectiveness: scale development and validation

Purpose– This paper aims to present a commentary on the Armstronget al.(2015) proposals to use checklists of Armstrong’s “advertising principles” to predict the effectiveness of alternative advertising executions and their tests of validity using paired ads with day-after recall scores.Design/methodology/approach– This paper discusses literature from anecdotal business journalism, cognitive science and behavioral economics that attempt to explain and accurately predict high-impact advertising. The commentary considers the value of using checklists and the relevancy complexity theory for examining whether or not checklists versus other tools are useful for accurately predicting advertising effectiveness.Findings– Anecdotal reports and scientific studies using true experiments support the practical benefits of advertising executives referring to advertising principles in the form of checklists when deciding which advertisement to run. Armstrong, Du, Green and Graefe (ADGG) provide a useful early warning tool that is useful for indicating ads that will not be effective, but their checklist method is unlikely to indicate which ads will have high impact. Researchers and executives should create and test the efficacy of configurations of content and design for identifying highly effective ads; testing should be done in clutter and using behavioroid measures (not seven-point scales); recall measures are inadequate proxies for behavior.Practical implications– By calling attention to the possibilities of using the persuasive advertising principles to test the ability to select specific ads that will most influence behavior such as purchases, ADGG offer a valuable contribution. Too often, advertisers and other decision makers ignore useful readily available information; creating tools useful for improving the quality of decision-making is missing in many marketing management contexts. ADGG indicate that such a tool is possible avoiding ads that are likely to be poor performing, advertising executions.Originality/value– This paper serves to emphasize the substantial value in using rigorous checklists as a step in making complex decisions such as advertising execution selections to avoid undesirable outcomes.

Effectiveness of Indecent Language in Advertising on Young Adult Consumer Attitudes and Purchase Intent

This study applies both the Dual Mediation Hypothesis and Schema Congruity Theory to examine the effectiveness of mild controversial advertising executions on young adult consumer cognitions, affect, and behavior. Findings from this study suggest that advertisements featuring mild indecent language result in more positive advertisement attitudes, brand attitudes, and purchase intentions than when decent language is used. Young adult consumers also report more positive advertisement and brand attitudes, and a greater likelihood of purchase when they perceive the advertisement to be congruent with their existing schema, regardless of whether the execution is mildly controversial or noncontroversial in nature. The findings of this study are important to advertisers in the development of effective creative execution techniques.

Comparing Brand Awareness Levels of In-Game Advertising in Sport Video Games Featuring Visual and Verbal Communication Cues

As technology advances, new forms of in-game advertising (IGA) executions continue to be developed. What was once simply a static advertisement has expanded to include verbal mentions of the brands placed within the games. While research has examined brand awareness of IGA, what has yet to be determined is the effectiveness of IGA which features these verbal cues. Therefore, this study examined the brand awareness levels of IGA which featured a visual brand placement (e.g., company logo placed within the game) versus those that have the visual placement accompanied by a verbal mention of the brand name. The results indicate that brand awareness levels were significantly higher for advertisements that contained both the visual and the verbal cues.

Online and Off-Line Advertising During March Madness: Which Companies Drive Consumers to the Web?

This study examined the advertisement structure of online and off-line broadcasts as consumer drivers to Web sites through the integration of specific calls to action. Content analysis was performed on ads aired during the online and off-line broadcasts of an NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. The key finding of this research is that communication and technology companies value advertising during online sporting-event broadcasts, because these companies were significantly more visible during the online broadcasts than the television broadcasts (χ2 = 6.67, p = .017). A much higher percentage of online ads were shorter (15 seconds) in duration (χ2 = 7.029, p = .01), appealed to fantasy (χ2 = 8.494, p = .004), and used advertising execution techniques emphasizing new products or features (49%) more often than in television ads (18%; χ2 = 11.078, p = .001). The findings provide insight into how calls to action in advertisements during Webcasts and traditional television offerings can move consumers to Web sites.

Publicity and Propaganda in 1930s Japan: Modernism as Method

Despite the apparent divide between modernism's sometimes recon dite aesthetic sensibilities and the more didactic needs of corporate advertising and political propaganda, the modernist artistic move ment was integral to the early development of modern Japanese promotional design, particularly in the sphere of photography As major Japanese corporations emerged in the 1920s, it was clear that they were not just product manufacturers, but arbiters of taste who often worked in tandem with the state in directing consumer life and consumption habits through compelling visual strategies. In the 1930s, when daily life rationalization trends melded into increasingly broad-based social mobilization, these same modernist pictorial strat egies began to be deployed concurrently in the dynamic realms of national publicity and propaganda (kokka senden or kokusaku senden) production, in both the graphic arts and exhibition display design. Through a close examination of the artistic production of some of the foremost commercial artists and photographers of the period, I will explore how the designers' integrative techniques exploited the affectivity of modernist manipulation of the image, effectively blur ring the line between publicity and propaganda through the 1930s and beyond. The burgeoning field of commercial design was profoundly influential in the transformation of Japanese social and cultural practices in the prewar period because the construction of recogniz able brand name products helped manufacturers forge a national consumer market by the late 1930s. Print advertisements for a range of newly emerging national Japanese corporations?Morinaga Confectionary Company, Matsushita Electric, and Ka? Soap among others?reveal the extensive use of modernist imagery to promote consumer products.2 Modernist styles were popular among advertis ing executives and designers precisely because of their close asso ciations with the modern, the new, the scientific, and the machine aesthetic. Not coincidentally the companies who employed modern ist aesthetics were largely (although not exclusively) companies marketing new types of modern consumer products like Western 1 (Arles: Editions Philippe Picquier, 2007), 47-70.

The ethics of marketing in Islamic and Christian communities

Purpose – This paper takes advantage of the closeness of two separated communities on the island of Cyprus to study how controversial products and forms of offensive advertising executions can be related to levels of religiousness, time usage and temporality. The resulting observations are then to be offered as insights into the notion of ethics of the two religious groups and how these might influence marketing to multicultural communitiesDesign/methodology/approach – The findings are based on a small‐scale survey of 530 students (211 Christians, 302 Muslims and 18 undeclared) who responded to a questionnaire distributed at two privately owned English‐speaking institutions, one in the north and one in the south part of Cyprus.Findings – The study indicates a high degree of commonality between Islamic and Christian student Cypriots living in adjoining regimes, even given their ideological and political differences.Research limitations/implications – The relatively small numbers studied and the focus on st...

An Analysis of Senior U.S. Advertising Executives' Perceptions of Internet Communication Benefits

This study empirically examined current perceptions of internet capabilities for marketing and marketing communications among senior advertising professionals in the United States through an email survey of senior advertising agency executives. Overall opinion about internet use as a marketing tool was highly positive. Factor analysis identified six specific internet benefit dimensions: Cost/Time Efficiency, Customer Orientation, Customer Interactivity, Promotional Use, Personal Contact Replacement, and a more general benefit—Overall Value of Internet in Marketing. While Customer Orientation and Customer Responsiveness benefits were seen as significant drivers of future web site activity by clients, Cost/Time Efficiency and Customer Orientation were seen as significantly contributing to a company's competitive business edge. Managerial implications are that, at present, senior agency personnel are more confident about the internet's role in business building rather than brand building, and consider this role as more influential in improving competitiveness, and making recommendations about web site usage to clients.

An Analysis of Senior U.S. Advertising Executives' Perceptions of Internet Communication Benefits

Abstract This study empirically examined current perceptions of internet capabilities for marketing and marketing communications among senior advertising professionals in the United States through an email survey of senior advertising agency executives. Overall opinion about internet use as a marketing tool was highly positive. Factor analysis identified six specific internet benefit dimensions: Cost/Time Efficiency, Customer Orientation, Customer Interactivity, Promotional Use, Personal Contact Replacement, and a more general benefit—Overall Value of Internet in Marketing. While Customer Orientation and Customer Responsiveness benefits were seen as significant drivers of future web site activity by clients, Cost/Time Efficiency and Customer Orientation were seen as significantly contributing to a company's competitive business edge. Managerial implications are that, at present, senior agency personnel are more confident about the internet's role in business building rather than brand building, and consid...

A Process Analysis of the Effects of Humorous Advertising Executions on Brand Claims Memory

We report 2 studies that examined how the strength of humorous advertising executions and their relevance to the brand claims in the advertisement influence consumer memory for the claims. We infer the underlying memory processes by testing claims memory using recall, recognition, and indirect tests following incidental exposure to advertisements manipulating humor strength and claims relevance. Memory for the humor component was checked as corroborating evidence. We also validated these inferences by contrasting these effects on claims and humor memory with those under instructed elaboration. Study 1 shows that for humor of low claims relevance, brand claims memory is an inverted U‐shaped function of humor strength. Compared to both nonhumor and high‐strength humor, moderate humor facilitates both encoding and retrieval of the claims. The patterns of humor memory and instructed elaboration effects suggest that low‐relevance humor is not spontaneously linked to the claims even when processing resources are available. Study 2 shows that when strong humor is made more relevant, brand claims memory improves even during incidental exposure. Corresponding humor memory and instructed elaboration effects imply that relevance encourages the formation of humor‐claims links that facilitate encoding and retrieval of the claims. The results show that although strong humor inhibits the processing received by the brand claims, enhancing its claims relevance can compensate for such inhibition.

Right appeals for the 'right self': connectedness–separateness self-schema and cross-cultural persuasion

While culture is often used as a segmentation variable, it may not be used as a surrogate for individual consumer in particular cultures. It is important to identify the underlying mechanism that explains the observed cross-cultural similarities and differences of consumer behaviour and to conduct international advertising research based on theoretically valid frameworks. The present paper presents the connectedness-separateness (C-S) self-schema theory based on psychological and anthropological research streams. It is argued that consumers from different cultures tend to have different construals of the self, which in turn influence their cognition, emotion, motivation and behaviour. It is proposed that cross-cultural differences in consumer responses to different advertising appeals may be explained by consumer C-S self-schema, rather than cultural orientation per se . The C-S construct can also be employed to segment the world market across cultures as well as within a culture. A series of propositions is developed by relating cross-cultural differences in self-construal to the effective design of cross-cultural advertising themes and executions.

The Content and Consumption of Advertisements

The Content and Consumption of Advertisements Daniel Miller (bio) Miller, Daniel. 1997. The content and consumption of advertisements. In Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg, 195–242. Reprinted with the permission of Berg Publishers. The intention of this chapter is to undertake the kind of textual analysis of advertising that has been developed in cultural and media studies, but in addition to place my interpretation within the wider context of ethnographic enquiry, including the reading of these materials by some of people who were also main informants within the ethnography as a whole. The text that was analysed comprises of 100 television advertisements, mainly based on whatever came in sequence while recording, but with some bias towards drinks, given my general emphasis upon that sector. The selected ‘sample’ consists of 16 adverts for alcoholic drinks, 18 for other drinks, 9 for medicine or vitamins, 12 for food products, 5 for utilities, 15 for household products such as detergents, 11 for building or furnishing materials including electronics, 4 for baby products, 3 for banks or insurance firms, 2 for cars, and 2 each for shops and clothes, plus single adverts for products and services ranging from education courses to security firms. Television advertising in Trinidad includes groups with just still cards and voice-overs, usually lasting between 7 and 10 seconds. My sample were taken from longer adverts. Roughly half would be 30 seconds, and the other half 15–20 seconds. They all include movement, either with persons or animation or graphics. A few adverts are longer, and a quite exceptional advert is that of Huggins furniture, which lasted for a full five minutes. This is longer than some of the gaps between advertising breaks! It is possible that one or two adverts that I have taken to be local, were in fact made by agencies abroad, for example, with American black models, but in most cases there are clues that help one to discern whether there is a local element in the production. Imported adverts are particularly common for certain products, such as perfumes and hair products. By contrast, shops, utilities and insurance are largely local, as are most beverage adverts other than some Colas. Detergents and household objects may come from either source. I also have an equally unsystematic collection of radio adverts collected by tape recording and press adverts obtained from cuttings. In addition I have the information obtained by sitting around within the advertising agencies when campaigns were being constructed and on some occasions asking advertising executives to comment on the adverts that I had recorded from television. Of the many perspectives from which the content of the advertising could be analysed, mine is derived from one of the sub-themes of this volume, which is to document the nature and extent of localization in Trinidadian commerce. This will first be addressed explicitly, including the industry’s own conceptualization of the local. I will then take four examples of aspects of advertising content involved in localization: the portrayal of Trinidad, of ethnicity, and of gender and sexuality, and the use of language and music. Much of this is based on relatively overt statements and contents. But, in parallel with the last chapter, I want then to move from this treatment of adverts as representations of society to a more analytical treatment of the role of the commodity itself as image in advertising. This analysis of content is then followed by an analysis of the way adverts are viewed by Trinidadians. The Analysis of Content The Issue of Localization In Chapter 3 it was noted that advertising lies at the centre of one of the most paradoxical findings with respect to local and global business. It is advertising, often regarded as a major source of global homogenization, that turns out to be a fierce proponent of localization . This is because of a contradiction by which the local firm or even the local office of a transnational only becomes of a significant size if it is asked to create its own advertising rather than to use ‘canned’ adverts. This in turn can only be justified by arguing for the specificity of the local. Localization of theme need not imply...

The Changing US Media and Marketing Environment: Implications For Media Advertising Expenditures In The 1990s

This paper outlines and analyses several major trends in marketing, retail, media and consumer buying areas that have been structurally impacting advertising expenditures in mass media. Based on this analysis, the author provides a reasoned outlook on why media advertising expenditures are unlikely to witness any dramatic resurgence in the US even after the recession is over. The implications gleaned from analysing various trends is used to argue that the prognostications made by some advertising and media executives are overly optimistic and rely on linear ways to project media advertising expenditures in the future. In contrast, the author attempts to show how and why many trends (obvious in the 1980s) are impeding the growth of media advertising in the US and are likely to have a far greater impact in the 1990s.

The Implications of Low-involvement Theory for Advertising Effectiveness

The concept of low involvement has attracted considerable interest, particularly over the last ten years, but its implications f or advertising (strategy, execution and research) are still not clear. This paper reviews the low-involvement literature and attempts to define what is meant by the concept, predict when low involvement is likely to occur and identify its key determinants. The paper then reviews and assesses what the literature has to say about the specific implications for advertising strategy in high- and low-involvement situations and concludes that the potential and power of advertising in low-involvement situations have been misunderstood and underestimated.

Authoritarian Advertising Executives and the Use of Black Models in Advertising

Recently, Hartmann and Husband (1974) have stated their belief that the values which are the underpinnings of the capitalistic free enterprise system have carried racism into our current economic practices. They contend that the statements which, when answered in the affirmative, are used to measure one's degree of authoritarianism are the basis for values widely accepted by our society. These all represent, what in a British context may loosely be called 'Victorian' values, stressing as they do discipline, subordination to authority, devotion to work, a Puritan and ascetic attitude to pleasure, and the capacity to succeed through grit and willpower. Though an extreme and rigid adherence to such values may signal an insecure and repressed personality, the values themselves hold considerable sway in our society.