Television advertising exposure and children’s nutritional awareness

The nutritional implications of children’s advertising has bean an issue of interest for nearly two decades. This study examines the relationship between the amount of a child’s exposure to television commercials and a child’s nutritional awareness. Nutritional awareness is measured by tests for nutritional knowledge and level of understanding of nutritional phraseology. The results indicate that exposure to television advertising during times characterized by a high proportion of child-oriented commercials is associated with lower scores on nutritional knowledge and understanding of nutritional phraseology. This relationship was not found for times characterized by a mixture of child- and nonchild-oriented advertising. Exposure to nonchild-oriented commercials was found to correlate with higher nutritional knowledge scores. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

A circumplex model for the behavioral constructs towards television advertising

The purpose of this study was to test the proposed model in order to explain some ambiguity in the advertising process. The model was formulated by focusing attention on relevant socio-psychological parameters motivating television viewers regarding television commercials. The fundamental structure of this model stemmed from a theory advanced by Louis Guttman. Utilizing this theory, an attempt was made to demonstrate empirically the advertising process from the consumer-viewer side.     

Situational factors affecting Preschoolers' responses to advertising

The effectiveness of advertising directed at preschool children was investigated. An experimental design, crossing program type, social condition of viewing, and frequency of exposure to commercials was utilized. Results indicate the possibility that young children's preferences are only affected under special circumstances. This paper is part of Doctoral Dissertation completed at the University of Illinois.     

Enhancing television advertising: same-language subtitles can improve brand recall,verbal memory,and behavioral intent

This research explores how same-language subtitles—on-screen text that matches the spoken language—can enhance advertising effectiveness for television commercials on normal viewing audiences outside of foreign-language or deaf-viewer contexts. A preliminary eye-tracker study shows that same-language subtitles capture disproportionate visual attention, and a first study highlights that same-language commercial subtitles can increase brand recall and memory of other verbal ad information. Three further studies using 12 additional ads reinforce the positive effects of subtitles and show how same-language subtitle effectiveness varies with changes in visual and verbal ad complexity. In addition to showing how subtitles can increase behavioral intent, results also highlight how varying subtitle content affects memory gains and illustrate how subtitles can lead to negative effects in the uncommon situation that brand information is missing from the audio. As the efficacy of television advertising becomes increasingly debated, same-language subtitling is a simple way to boost advertising effectiveness.     

Television commercials in violent programming: An experimental evaluation of their effects on children

Using an experimental method, this study found that when a commercial was viewed immediately following a high-violence dramatic programming segment, children’s ad copy recognition scores were significantly lower and attitudes toward the ad and the advertised brand were significantly less favorable than when the commercial was viewed following a low-violence (but otherwise near-identical) program segment. The influence of program violence level on some advertising response measures was more pronounced when the commercial was positioned immediately following the dramatic programming segment than when immediately preceding it. The study cautions advertisers to examine carefully whether, in reaching for high audience ratings and cost efficiency through violent television programs, they may be sacrificing communication effectiveness of their brand advertising. He has published numerous articles on advertising effectiveness, children and advertising, buyer behavior, and marketing strategy in theJournal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Communication, Journal of Retailing, Journal of Consumer Affairs, Journal of International Marketing, and others. Her primary research interests are in children and advertising issues, buyer behavior, and marketing ethics. Her research has appeared in theJournal of Services Marketing, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Journal of Nonprofit and Public Sector Marketing, and proceedings of numerous national and regional marketing conferences.     

Exploring deception and puffery in television advertising

Public policy decisions dealing with deceptive advertising have relied extensively on case-by-case adjudication with the Federal Trade Commission. Unfortunately, behavioral evidence has not been considered in the vast majority of these cases. The final determination rests with the Commission’s own expertise in judging an advertisement’s “capacity to deceive.” Consumer response data are not required, although recent developments suggest the FTC is seriously considering the inclusion of meaningful behavioral evidence in policymaking and adjudicative proceedings. This study is one of a series dealing with dimensions of perceived deception across different respondent populations (including students, lawyers, housewives, children, and minority groups). The focus here is on the semantics of deception, i.e., the way in which subjects evaluate selected television commercials which were unofficially rated for deception by FTC staff attorneys. The factor analytic paradigm provides one approach for generating summaries of viewer’s evaluative (affective) responses, and thereby providing some normative or benchmark data of potential value in the regulatory process.     

Information content and consumer readership of print ads: A comparison of search and experience products

This study builds on past research involving the economics of advertising information (Nelson 1970, 1974) to examine the interplay between advertisers' provision and consumers' readership of information. The authors focus on the prepurchase verifiability of advertising claims in three product categories: search products, experience shopping products, and experience convenience products. They use a broader measure of the information content of advertising than in past research, together with Starch readership scores for a sample of ads from nine U.S. magazines. The results show that the relationship between information provision and readership is positive for search products, negative for convenience products, and nonsignificant for shopping products. Average information levels are significantly higher in ads for shopping products than for convenience and search products. These findings suggest that advertisers may be underinforming consumers when promoting search products. George R. Franke (gfranke@cba.ua.edu) is a professor and Reese Phifer Fellow of Marketing at the University of Alabama. His Ph.D. is from the University of North Carolina. His research interests include public policy, ethics, advertising, and research methodology. His previous research on the information content of advertising includes articles that received best-paper awards from theJournal of Advertising and theJournal of Public Policy & Marketing. Bruce A. Huhmann (bhuhmann@nmsu.edu) is an assistant professor of marketing at New Mexico State University. His Ph.D. is from the University of Alabama. His research interests include advertising, consumer behavior, and international marketing. His primary stream of research focuses on verbal and visual appeals in advertising. He has also coauthored a study on sources of information used in consumer decision making. He has published articles in theJournal of Consumer Research, theJournal of Advertising, theJournal of Health Care Marketing, theAsia Pacific Journal of Management, and in other journals and conference proceedings. David L. Mothersbaugh (dmothers@cba.ua.edu) is an associate professor and Board of Visitors Research Fellow in marketing at the University of Alabama. His Ph.D. is from the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests include advertising, rhetorical language, consumer knowledge, search and decision making, e-commerce, and services marketing. He has publications in journals such as theJournal of Consumer Research, theJournal of Retailing, theJournal of Business Research, and theJournal of Consumer Affairs, as well as in various conference proceedings.     

Cross-cultural research in advertising: An assessment of methodologies

The volume of scholarly work in cross-cultural advertising has been increasing in recent years. This study examines empirical studies in this area from a methodological perspective. Cross-cultural research designs should include many critical facets that do not surface in studies involving single cultures. These facets are discussed within the context of cross-cultural advertising literature. It is apparent from this review that a sharper focus on cross-cultural research tools and considerations can strengthen studies of advertising, lead to more robust results, and increase validity and reliability. Both students and practitioners need meaningful and generalizable findings that will emerge only when strict methodological considerations are adhered to. His articles have appeared in theJournal of Marketing, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and others. His areas of interest include global new product development, entrepreneurship, and exporting.     

Capital market impact of product marketing strategy: Evidence from the relationship between advertising expenses and cost of capital

To analyze the prospect of a firm’s advertising decision affecting shareholder wealth, this article investigates the relationship between a firm’s advertising expenditure and the market-imposed weighted average cost of capital. For a sample of U.S. firms, the results show that advertising expenditure is negatively related to the cost of equity and positively related to debt utilization, resulting in a lower weighted average cost of capital. A higher debt level, however, associates with a lower level of financial strength. In addition, and plausibly by lowering the cost of capital through product market advertising, firms with higher advertising expenditure experience higher performance in terms of market value added. Manohar Singh (msingh@willamette.edu) is an associate professor of finance at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. He holds a Ph.D. in finance from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. His published research includes publications in theJournal of Banking and Finance, Financial Review, theJournal of Multinational Financial Management, and thePacific Basin Finance Journal, among others. His research interests include corporate governance and corporate finance and strategy. Sheri Faircloth (fairclos@unr.nevada.edu) is an associate professor of finance at the University of Nevada at Reno. She holds a Ph.D. in finance from the University of Texas at Arlington. Her research interests include corporate finance, investments, and real estate finance. She has published in finance journals such as theJournal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, theJournal of Real Estate Literature, Review of the Academy of Finance, theJournal of the Academy of Finance, andApplied Economics. Ali Nejadmalayeri (aliala@unr.edu) is an assistant professor of finance at the University of Nevada at Reno. He holds an M.B.A. from Texas A&M University and a Ph.D. in finance from the University of Arizona. He has published in finance journals such as theJournal of Business, theJournal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, and theJournal of Multinational Financial Management. He was awarded the College of Business Researcher of the Year Award for 2004.     

Personality and ad-evoked feelings: The case for extraversion and neuroticism

Feeling responses to advertisements have been identified as important advertising effects. Considerable intersubject variance has been noted across those ad-evoked feelings. Conceptual models have proposed individual differences, including personality, as antecedents of adevoked feelings. In the psychology literature,extraversion andneuroticism have been shown to predict positive and negative affect, respectively. The current research proposes and tests relationships between extraversion and neuroticism and specific, transient feeling responses to ads. Additionally, the single traitaffect intensity, an alternative construal of individual differences in affective predispositions, is measured and compared with extraversion and neuroticism. Extraversion and neuroticism appear to be preferable, theoretically grounded predictors of adevoked feelings and consequent consumer attitudes. These findings should advance advertising managers’ understandings of differences across consumers in fundamental patterns of feeling responses to advertising. He received his Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1994. His research has been published inPsychological Reports andAdvances in Consumer Research.     

Social responsibility and personal success: A research note

Views of corporate social responsibility recognize thatindividual decision makers are key to implementing socially responsible programs and that it is difficult to ask executives to act in a socially responsible manner if such actions have a negative impact on personal success. Using a sample of more than 300 advertising executives, the compatibility of social responsibility and personal success are explored by examining the relationship between social responsibility and advertising executives’ incomes and titles. Findings indicate that neither penalties nor rewards accrue to advertising executives for socially responsible actions. Implications for executives wanting their organizations to be viewed as socially responsible are discussed.     

Estimating individual cross-section coefficients from the random coefficient regression model

Marketing researchers frequently encounter cross-sectional, time-series data when developing sales response models. One approach to analyzing such data is to estimate a separate OLS equation for each cross-section. Alternatively, one could pool the data from all cross-sections to estimate a single set of response coefficients for all cross-sections. However, when data are pooled, the responsiveness of individual cross-sections cannot be evaluated. In this note, we introduce a version of the random coefficient model that can be used to estimate separate sets of response coefficients for each cross-section, thereby circumventing the assumption that coefficients are homogeneous in all cross-sections. We demonstrate this approach with an empirical model that relates brand level sales to price and advertising. This research was conducted while he was on the Marketing Department faculty at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his doctorate from Purdue University. Dr. Leone’s primary research interests investigating the effects of advertising, price, and promotion on market performance. He has written extensively in this area and has published in theJournal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Advertising, Management Science andOperations Research. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics at Purdue University. His research focuses on econometric methods and statistical modelling in finance and marketing. He received his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Mulhern specializes in econometric and time series analysis, particularly of retail price and promotional activities. His research has appeared in theJournal of Marketing and theJournal of Business Research.     

Advertising’s image —U.S. and Yugoslavia

Advertising is one of the institutions which cut across cultures, and this study assesses comparative differences and similarities between the U.S. and Yugoslavia in their attitudes toward advertising as an institution. The comparison is effected through replication in Yugoslavia of the Bauer-Geyser Study. The findings indicate that advertising in Yugoslavia is not a salient issue, although there is a greater homogeneity of salience of other specific issues than in the U.S. More U.S. respondents expressed a need for change in advertising; more Yugoslav respondents were indifferent toward advertising. The reasons for liking and disliking advertising also differed in the two samples. The implications are that the intensity of advertising in the U.S. has made it a salient irritant to at least a minority of consumers, whereas in Yugoslavia there is an immediate need for improvement in the creative aspect of advertising.     

A longitudinal view of women's role portrayal in television advertising

This article concerns an issue of interest to both advertisers and consumers: female sex-role portrayal in television advertisements. A comparative study using content analysis was conducted for television commercials observed in 1977 and in 1980, respectively. Significant changes between these years are noted on a number of dimensions relevant to the way women are represented in television commercials. These changes are also interpreted in a broader historical perspective whenever possible. Both positive and negative changes are noted and discussed.     

The role of affect in attitude formation: A classical conditioning approach

This study investigates the role of affect in attitude formation. Two experiments, using established conditioning procedures, assessed the impact of affect on attitude formation. The results of Experiment 1 indicate that affect can influence attitudes even in the absence of product beliefs. The results of Experiment 2 suggest that affect plays as important or more important a role than the belief mechanism in attitude formation, depending on the number of repetitions. Implications of the results for understanding the role of affect in advertising are discussed. John Kim is an associate professor of marketing in the School of Business Administration at Oakland University. He earned his Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Cincinnati. His research interests include consumer decision making, advertising effectiveness, and brand equity. His work has appeared in theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Consumer Research, and theJournal of Business Research. Jeen-Su Lim is Interim Chair and a professor of marketing at the University of Toledo. He received his Ph.D. in marketing from Indiana University. His work has appeared in many journals, including theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Consumer Research, theJournal of Business Research, Industrial Marketing Management, International Marketing Review, Management International Review, Psychology and Marketing, and theJournal of Health Care Marketing, among others. His research interests include consumer inference processes, new product development and competitive strategy, and export marketing. Mukesh Bhargava is an assistant professor in the Department of Marketing and Management at Oakland University. He has a Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Texas, Austin, and several years of practical experience in advertising and marketing research. His research includes areas such as advertising effectiveness and evaluation of marketing strategy in business and nonprofit organizations. His work has appeared in theJournal of Advertising Research, Marketing Letters, theJournal of Business Research, and theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, among others.     

Double jeopardy in television program choice

Double jeopardy is a phenomenon in which a brand with a low market share not only has fewer customers, but these customers are not very brand loyal. This note reports the results of a study designed to investigate the occurrence of this double jeopardy phenomenon in television program choice. Survey data show that double jeopardy is especially prevalent in television programs that directly compete with each other. Double jeopardy in television program choice may be the consequence of asymmetry in awareness of television programs. He received his M.S. in Management Science and Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Texas at Austin. His work in the areas of research methodology, comparative and outdoor advertising, and Hispanic consumer research have appeared in several marketing and advertising journals includingMarketing Science, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, Psychology and Marketing, andMarketing Letters.     

How brand innovativeness creates advertising flexibility

We advance a broadened conceptualization of advertising context effects by considering how consumer response is influenced by the competitive advertising context. This contextual variable reflects how typically or atypically advertising tactics are employed by brands in a product category. Study 1 demonstrates that employing an advertising tactic that is perceived by consumers as atypical in a category undermines its influence on brand attitudes. Study 2 shows that this persuasion penalty is circumvented by innovative brands through a phenomenon we refer to as advertising flexibility that enables innovative brands to successfully employ advertising tactics under a wider range of conditions than non-innovative brands. A final study provides process evidence for this effect by showing that brand attitudes are determined by advertising content for innovative brands but by considerations of the competitive advertising context for non-innovative brands.     

A meta-analysis of gender roles in advertising

Although interest regarding gender role portrayals in advertising has persisted for many years, the degree of gender stereotyping in advertising, possible changes of gender stereotyping over the years, and the nature of the relationship between gender stereotyping in advertising and role changing developments in society have not yet been studied in previous research. To address these issues, this study provides a meta-analysis of the research on gender roles in TV and radio advertising based on 64 primary studies. The results show that stereotyping is prevalent in advertising. Stereotyping occurs mainly related to gender’s occupational status, meaning gender equality in advertising is least likely in an area that is the primary concern of gender-related politics. Stereotyping in advertising has indeed decreased over the years, although this decrease is almost exclusively due to developments in high masculinity countries. The results of a correlation analysis and a simultaneous equation model show that gender stereotyping in advertising depends on gender-related developments and value changes in society rather than the other way around. These results provide for the first time empirical support for the mirror argument over the mold argument in the long-standing debate about advertising’s consequences for society. The findings further provide implications for researchers, public policy makers, and marketing practitioners.     

Firm-to-firm and interpersonal relationships: Perspectives from advertising agency account managers

We do things for people we like, our friends. However, in firm-to-firm exchange relationships, boundary spanners are economic agents representing their firms contractually to achieve specific goals. Thus, questions arise as to whether close interpersonal relationships exist in business settings, how they are defined, and whether they influence the nature and functioning of interfirm exchange. A qualitative study with advertising agency account managers finds that analyzing interpersonal relationships across groups from both sides defines firm-to-firm relationships. Participants define these relationships based on the extent to which the agency is involved in the client’s business across categories including vendor, partner, and surrogate manager. Interpersonal relationship exist across categories including strictly business, business friends, and highly personal. The relationships are distinguished based on the knowledge base developed about the brand manager. Overwhelmingly, the participants claim that devoloping close, interpersonal relationships is beneficial to both their professional and personal lives. Diana L. Haytko (DianaHaytko@smsu.edu) is an associate professor of marketing at Southwest Missouri State University. She received a B.S. in advertising from the University of Colorado, an M.S. in advertising from the University of Illinois, and an M.B.A. and Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Wisconsin. Her research interests are in the field of relationship marketing, both from a business-to-business and a consumer perspective. Her work has been published in theJournal of Consumer Research, theJournal of Retailing, theJournal of Marketing Communications, and theJournal of Shopping Center Research.     

The role of contingency awareness,involvement, and need for cognition in attitude formation

This research investigates the role of involvement and need for cognition in influencing contingency awareness in attitude formation. Two experiments examine the nature of favorable attitudes formulated through established classical conditioning procedures. The results of Experiment 1 indicate that awareness influences attitudes toward a conditioned stimulus, particularly under conditions of high involvement and high need for cognition. Experiment 2 suggests that contingency awareness mediates the relationship between inferential belief formation and attitudes and that this effect is stronger under high involvement and high need for cognition. Implications for understanding the role of classical conditioning procedures in advertising are discussed. Randi Priluck (Rpriluck@pace.edu) is an associate professor of marketing at Pace University in New York. She received her Ph.D. from Drexel University in 1995. Her research areas of interest include classical conditioning and its advertising implications, cobranding strategies, and relationship marketing. She has written articles for theJournal of Advertising, theJournal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising, theJournal of Product & Brand Management, Psychology & Marketing, theJournal of Consumer Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Management, theJournal of Marketing Practice: Applied Marketing Science, theInternational Journal of Consumer Marketing, theInternational Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, theJournal of Marketing Education, and theJournal of Services Marketing. Brian D. Till (Tillbd@slu.edu) is an associate professor and chair of marketing at Saint Louis University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in 1993. His research areas of interest include classical conditioning, cobranding strategies, and the use of celebrity endorsers in advertising. He has published in theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Advertising, theJournal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising, Psychology & Marketing, theJournal of Product and Brand Management, and theJournal of Consumer Marketing.