US Advertising Research Articles

Driven to Distraction: A Veblenian Perspective on Advertising

Driven to Distraction: A Veblenian Perspective on Advertising

Driving return on media investment with US Hispanics in the 21st century: The nativity-based view

Ever since the nativity-based view (NBV) was first introduced in 2015, business practitioners have been surprised to learn that there is a better way to target US Hispanics than by simply using Spanish-language media. This was a watershed moment for the US advertising and marketing industry — a paradigm shift that leading brands, advertising agencies and research companies did not see coming. Challenging the Hispanic marketing paradigm, the NBV proposes that nativity is more effective in driving media return on media investment than marketing to Hispanics in-language. To address recent concerns that the NBV, as a construct, lacks internal validity, this paper compares past NBV research spanning almost a decade versus 2023 data. This study continues to show that there are significant differences between US-born and foreign-born Hispanics on a number of dimensions, including demographics, language usage, media consumption and return on media investment. This new media model has strong implications for marketing to US Hispanics in the 21st century, providing brands and advertising agencies with a simple, and more effective model that has lived in the shadows of language-based marketing since the early 1990s. This paper suggests companies that follow the customer rather than the industry narrative are better positioned to win in an overwhelming US-born Hispanic marketplace.

Consumer skepticism, advertising regulation, and the internet: Questions worth exploring

AbstractSince 1990, the US advertising, regulatory, and consumer information landscapes have changed materially, raising the possibility that consumers' fundamental beliefs about advertising as an activity or institution have also changed. Nine national polls of advertising sentiment, fielded between 1964 and 1989 by the Roper Organization or the Opinion Research Corporation, were replicated with panel members matched to the US adult population. Preliminary results suggest that the internet era may have fostered a trust‐because‐we‐can‐verify consumer attitude toward advertising. The internet has changed the consumer information landscape by reducing the difficulty of assessing claims, fostering independent evaluators who often include competitors, and providing a venue for consumer retaliation. The implications for advertising regulation may contradict the Pertschuk view (1982) of regulation again embraced by some at the Federal Trade Commission. Rather than enhancing the need for advertising regulation and enforcement, the internet may have reduced the need for such efforts.

Flying Saucers and UFOs in US Advertising During the Cold War, 1947–1989

Abstract: References to and images of flying saucers and UFOs have appeared in US advertising since at least 1947. This project argues ads from 1947–1989 reflected the symbol's fluidity in advertising and influences of the Cold War, UFO knowledge and mythology, and the advertising industry. Six themes are examined: (1) modern fashion and design; (2) technological progress and utopias; (3) little green men as consumers; (4) alarming language and images in ads for flying saucer media; (5) the creation of publicity stunts and camouflaged advertising forms; and (6) in the 1980s, UFOs representing consumer transcendence and awe. Flying saucers and UFOs in ads functioned as "floating signifiers"— as symbols for the fashionable, fanciful, or the frightening—to represent a variety of values and advertising techniques.

Tracing the Birth of the Audience Commodity: A Review of Zoe Sherman’s Modern Advertising and the Market for Audience Attention

Scholars in the field of critical political economy of communication have long considered how the media industry’s economic arrangements have influenced modern capitalist systems. Notably, these scholars have argued that the media industry’s primary goal has been the construction of an “audience commodity” that can be sold to advertisers. In Modern Advertising and the Market for Audience Attention: The US Advertising Industry’s Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Transition, Zoe Sherman outlines the origins of this idea of the consumable audience. This review highlights the significant contributions of Sherman’s work for communication scholars. Moreover, it considers whether economic models that stress the power of information and data ownership are best suited to challenge the contemporary realities of surveillance capitalism, the roots of which Sherman traces to the professionalization of the advertising industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Impact of Rent from Unequal Exchange on Shaikh’s Classical-Keynesian Political Economic Analysis: The Example of Facebook

In this paper, Shaikh’s 1949–2011 classical Phillips curve (CPC) is replicated and extended to 2016. This updated CPC does not follow the pattern anticipated by Shaikh for the years 2012 to 2016. This paper hypothesizes that this divergence is a result of an increasingly “rentier” economy based on surplus extraction through unequal exchange (UE). Andrea Ricci’s methodology is then applied to the 2014 US advertising and market research (A&MR) sector as a sample test of this hypothesis. This analysis shows that UE accounts for $64 billion, or almost a half (45.3 percent), of total US A&MR value added ($141.3 billion) in 2014. A modification of Ricci’s methodology for a firm-level UE estimation finds that in 2014 Facebook alone was able to extract a within-industry, within-country, between-firm absolute rent of $3.8 billion. The paper concludes that Shaikh’s analysis needs to be extended with non-classical political economy UE, or “rentier economy,” analysis.

Portrayals of Minorities and Women in Super Bowl Advertising

Portrayals of women and minorities advertising have long been of interest to advertising scholars. While research has found that the overall representation of these groups has increased, some stereotypes persist, and so do questions about the quality and prominence of portrayals. This study examines portrayals of minorities and women in Super Bowl advertising, the main “pop culture” showcase for US advertising. A content analysis of 10 years of Super Bowl ads is conducted and a multinomial logit regression model is employed to delve deeper into the content analysis results. Findings show that while the overall representation of women and various minority groups is strong, a deeper analysis shows that these groups are seldom depicted as primary characters by themselves and that some subtle stereotypes persist. We also find that ads featuring female principal characters are more likely to feature home settings, sexual appeals, emotional messages, and music as a major element and that it is less likely for female (vs. male) celebrities to be used. Minority principal characters are more likely to be celebrities and be included in ads with music or for technical products but are less likely to be included in ads featuring corporate social responsibility messages.

Going native on Facebook: a content analysis of sponsored messages on undergraduate student Facebook pages

This paper examines the prevalence and nature of sponsored messages on Facebook. Results of a content analysis of desktop and mobile Facebook pages from 52 undergraduate student subjects showed 53% of sponsored messages in the desktop sample and 100% of sponsored messages in the mobile sample would be categorised as native advertising, as they were located in the user's news feed. Approximately 12% of all news feed posts were sponsored posts and almost 90% of sponsored news feed posts were based on the user's or user's friends' actions. The majority of the sponsoring advertisers were from companies established after the year 2000, and only 11% were leading US advertisers.

Under the Cloak of Whiteness: A Circuit of Culture Analysis of Opportunity Hoarding and Colour-blind Racism Inside US Advertising Internship Programs

Drawing on qualitative fieldwork at three large agencies, this article adapts Richard Johnson’s “circuit of culture” (1986) as a framework to examine both the material practices that help reproduce an overwhelmingly white labour force within US advertising agencies and the ideological screens that conceal them from scrutiny, critique, and reform. I argue that efforts to diversify advertising through internship-based affirmative action programs are ultimately undermined and overwhelmed by the more widespread systems of white privilege whereby agency executives and powerful clients bypass the application process and directly place personal friends and relatives into highly sought after internship slots. Furthermore, I contend that such material practices of class preference are masked, and thereby enabled, by ideological screens of colour-blind meritocracy. I argue that colour-blindness leads to meritocracy in theory, but race discrimination in practice, and conclude with a discussion of some possible implications for communication theory in general and critical media industry studies in particular.

Looking westwards and worshipping: The New York ‘Creative Revolution’ and British advertising, 1956–1980

This article explores the ways in which developments associated with the ‘creative revolution’ in New York advertising in the 1950s and 1960s were imported into the United Kingdom, helping to reshape advertising practices in London. In locating the development of UK advertising within this history of commercial exchange, this article explores the modes of transmission and the material conduits through which innovations in advertising practice crossed the Atlantic. It also focuses on the role played by a distinctive 1960s formation of practitioners who used an organisation called the Design and Art Directors Association to champion the new idioms of US advertising. Their rise to influence helped to legitimate a new set of criteria for evaluating advertising which placed ‘creativity’ above ‘research’ and the ‘science of selling’ as the principal measure of good advertising. In exploring the exporting of the ‘new advertising’ to the United Kingdom, this article develops a particular understanding of how Anglo-American advertising relations worked to shape UK advertising practices. This foregrounds the way the US ‘creative revolution’, like other forms of US advertising, was adapted, hybridised and indigenised in its importing to Britain. This article shows how the ‘new advertising’ pioneered in New York was reworked and combined with more local cultural influences. Out of this emerged distinctive styles of British advertising in the 1960s and 1970s.

Super Bowl ad likeability: Enduring and emerging predictors

US advertisers love the Super Bowl because it reaches a huge and highly receptive audience. One metric that Super Bowl advertisers watch closely is ad likeability as this is correlated with sales success. Tomkovick, Yelkur, and Christians (2001, Journal of Marketing Communications 7: 89–108) studied ad likeability for Super Bowl ads in the 1990s. In this paper, we replicate and extend their research using USA Today's measurement of Super Bowl ad likeability in the decade of the 2000s as our dependent variable of interest. Our findings on 438 Super Bowl ads show that humor, animals, and product category were enduring predictors of ad likeability. Product information and the presence of children in Super Bowl ads were found to be emerging predictors of ad likeability. Most notably, the amount of product information provided in Super Bowl commercials was inversely related to ad likeability. Implications for advertisers are presented, as are conclusions, study limitations and directions for future research.

Public Enemy Number One: The US Advertising Council's First Drug Abuse Prevention Campaign

This article explores the Advertising Council's first national drug abuse prevention campaign in the s. Scholarship thus far has demonstrated the ways in which the issue of drug abuse represented a chief political strategy for President Nixon. Evidence from major trade press publications, congressional hearings, and an array of archival sources suggest that this campaign was also part of a public relations crusade on behalf of the advertising industry in response to public criticism of its role in abetting a culture of drug dependence. These institutional and political pressures helped shape drug abuse prevention in the s and for the decades that followed.

Marketing blackness

Marketing blackness, or black cultural identity, involves promotional strategies reliant on persons and other symbolic and material representations socially and historically constructed as black (e.g. speech and phonetic conventions, folklore, style, fashion, music, usage of the body, and the black physical form). This research presents a framework that assesses the strategic role blackness representations play in US advertising. The framework addresses the fundamental question of how advertisers use blackness representations to deliver promises about their products' benefits, a necessary first step in ultimately understanding their effectiveness and their impact on blackness itself. The framework orders blackness representations along two dimensions of meaning based on the central claims made in advertisements: (1) claims about the product/brand as a cultural resource, and (2) claims about the viewer that emphasize themes of similarity or difference. The framework also specifies a range of advertising strategies reliant on blackness representations located along the two dimensions. I suggest that the time has come to change the focus of research on blackness representations from numeric representation and role status to understanding their role in promotional strategy more broadly, particularly in branding.

Strategic and Tactical Integration Between Print and Web Advertising in the United States and Australia

Integrating communication strategy between new and traditional media appears necessary for advertisers to achieve maximum communication impact. This study compares the extent to which advertisers in the United States and Australia integrate messages in print ads and websites. Australian advertisers utilized the power of the internet better than US advertisers, and appeared to “do more” in that Australian advertisers' websites exhibit higher-level advertising objectives than their print ads. Overall, fewer than 20% of print ads and websites are strategically well integrated in both countries. Integration tends to be more tactical than strategic as both US and Australian advertisers integrated an average of four out of eight tactical elements between the print ads and the websites. The authors discuss implications of these findings for both countries.

Misplaced marketing The social harm of public service advertising

The power of advertising is presumed and people behind most public service advertising campaigns see advertising itself as the solution. An advertising campaign that aims to serve a social goal faces many pragmatic obstacles. Advertising professionals contribute to this problem. Just because advertising sometimes can help generate consumer interest in specific brand names does not also mean that every advertised effort will get people to make significant changes in their behavior. The Advertising Council, “dedicated to using the great resources of the advertising industry” to serve the public interest is the largest producer of public service mass communications, campaigns in the USA. Free public service work from anyone is admirable and the Advertising Council’s dedication to public service is a wonderful credit to business groups supporting it. In other countries that lack the traditions of the US Advertising Council, the advertising‐based campaigns draw on government tax funds or limited resources of a public group.

Strategy in Taiwanese and us corporate web pages: A cross‐cultural comparison

This cross‐cultural study examines the communication strategies employed by Taiwanese and US corporate Web pages. The results show that communication strategies differ sharply between Taiwanese and US advertisers. Taiwanese companies appear to be more eager to show their sales intent than US companies. A remarkable contrast is also found in terms of publicizing the performance of social responsibility. Companies in both countries seem to show different styles in relationship marketing. The implications for cross‐cultural theories, international advertising, and socialeconomic differences are discussed.

A content analysis of connectedness vs. separateness themes used in US and PRC print advertisements

Psychologists and anthropologists have long observed that people in different cultures have different self‐concepts in terms of the relation between self and other people. The separated self‐schema or “separatedness” is most often attributed to Western cultures. Applies the connectedness‐separateness theory to test a set of hypotheses using content analysis of advertising themes across cultures. Results revealed that “connected appeals” were used more in PRC advertising, while “separated appeals” were used more in US advertising. Target audiences and product types were found to moderate the cultural effect. The findings were predicted and explained by the connectedness‐separateness self‐schema theory. Implications and future research directions are discussed.

The USA's biggest marketing event keeps getting bigger: an in-depth look at Super Bowl advertising in the 1990s

Over the last decade, US Super Bol advertising has evolved into a unique phenomenon. US advertisers love the Super Bowl because it has reached an average television audience of over 120 million US viewers for the last 10 years. This manuscript examines the popularity of Super Bowl advertising during the 1990s. Every Super Bowl advertisement aired in the USA during the 10-year period 1990-1999 was video taped and viewed. In addition, USA Today's published Super Bowl advertisement likeability results were incorporated into the analysis. A total of 454 national advertisements were examined with regard to advertisement likeability. The impact of humour, advertisement length, animals, celebrities and product category type on advertisement likeability was assessed with the help of a comprehensive Super Bowl advertisement likeability model. It was hypothesized that each of these variables would be positively related to Super Bowl advertisement likeability. The results of a multiple regression analysis indicated that all these factors except the presence of celebrities had a strong significant impact on advertisement likeability scores.Based on these findings,this paper provides advertising strategy recommendations for future Super Bowl advertisers and marketing academics.

An international analysis of emotional and rational appeals in services vs goods advertising

The growth of international business, combined with an increase in the number of service offerings, underscores the importance of understanding effective promotional strategies for services versus goods in international markets. The current study examines advertising appeals for services and goods across four different countries: Brazil, Taiwan, Mexico and the USA. Results of a content analysis indicate that the use of rational and emotional appeals differs across both product type and country. It is suggested that culture plays a role in the use of the appeals and that the product type × country interaction is strongly reflected in Taiwanese and US advertising.

‘Holding up Half of the Sky’? A Sociocultural Comparison of Gender‐Role Portrayals in Chinese and US Advertising

Considering advertising as a social actor and cultural artefact, this article analyses the gender roles portrayed in a total of 667 Chinese and US television commercials from 1996. Results show that advertising in both countries portrayed more men in occupational roles and more women in non‐occupational ones, and depicted more men in recreational activities and more women in decorative situations. Chinese television advertising was found to reinforce even more stereotypes than its US counterpart. Male models, for example, played relaxing roles more often but family roles less often in Chinese commercials. Other major differences involved the styles of dress worn by female models and the number of models portrayed, which were found to be consistently related to the sociocultural influences in the two countries. Gender‐role portrayals were also found to have much to do with the product categories advertised.