The Third-Person Effect in Advertising: A Meta-Analysis

Prior meta-analyses have found evidence for differences in the third-person effect across message types, indicating that the third-person effect is a communication context-specific phenomenon. These meta-analyses do not explain why effects of the perceptual hypothesis in advertising are smaller when compared to communication in general; they do not address the broad range of consumer behavior variables that are affected by third-person perceptions; and they have not investigated whether the perceived effects on the self or on others are better predictors for behavioral responses than third-person perceptions in advertising. This meta-analysis addresses these issues and investigates the perceptual and behavioral hypotheses of the third-person effect in an advertising context. Findings indicate that third-person perceptions in product advertising are weaker when compared to other communication messages due to developments over time and the mixed gratifications provided by product advertising messages. Third-person perceptions in advertising can increase or decrease consumer behavior depending on whether the behavior is self related (e.g., body-related responses) or other related (e.g., support for regulation). Furthermore, perceived effects on self or on others are better behavioral predictors than third-person perceptions, providing managerial implications for advertising campaign pretesting.     

The Effectiveness of Advertising: A Meta-Meta-Analysis of Advertising Inputs and Outcomes

This study measures the degree of advertising effectiveness in previous advertising research studies. By analyzing 324 meta-analytic effect sizes taken from 44 meta-analyses that included more than 1,700 primary studies with more than 2.4 million subjects, the meta-meta-analytic effect size of .2 shows that advertising is effective. The findings differ across advertising inputs and outcomes, and identify different hierarchies of effects due to different underlying processes. The source primarily influences attitudes and behavior due to an acceptability–inference process; the message influences cognitions and emotions due to an emotion–cognition process; strategies foster processing and effects on memory due to a retrieval process; and receiver characteristics primarily influence attitudes, cognitions, and emotions due to a sense-making process. These findings provide quantitative evidence for the effectiveness of advertising and major advertising tools, provide empirical generalizations for researchers and practitioners, and suggest a new contingency for the applicability of hierarchy of effects models.     

Marketing images of gender: A visual analysis

An interpretive method drawing from social psychology, feminist theory and art criticism is developed to analyze contemporary images of gender. Utilizing and expanding upon visual research techniques, a selection of ads from contemporary fashion magazines and catalogs was assembled to illustrate particular themes suggested by research on the representation of gender in advertising. The body‐and what it expresses‐is a site of central concern, and discussion focuses on how female and male bodies are represented in advertising. The conventions of art history, when framed within a social science perspective, offer unique contributions to the study of advertising and gender, well suited for researchers interested in the culture of consumption.     

The Role of Advertising in the Market Process: A Survey

The positive role played by advertising in the market process has been largely ignored by academic economists. It is only recently, since the modern economic revolution, that economists have realized the benefits of advertising and have joined the research agenda developed by researchers in marketing and other business fields. The present survey details the literature that examines the role played by advertising in lowering the ‘full price’ to consumers which allows consumers to maximize utility and allows the producers/retailers to maximize profits. The review begins with the seminal article by Stigler in 1960 which develops a (now famous) theory of the economics of information. Nelson's characteristics of goods and services are surveyed along with the extensions of other economists to the classification frameworks of Nelson and Porter. The survey follows the development of the theory of advertising in economics to the present day, and provides recent theoretical advances as well as empirical tests of these seminal theories.     

Online Focus Groups

The rise of Web 2.0, the advent of greater bandwidth, and new technology platforms have made it possible to extend the range of focus-group research to the online environment. This provides advertising researchers, advertising agencies, and advertisers with opportunities to reach consumers who were heretofore difficult to reach, to create groups with new and different compositions, and to use online collaborative tools not readily available in face-to-face groups. This article reviews online focus-group research, identifies several types of online groups, and contrasts the uses and results of online focus groups with the uses and results of face-to-face focus groups. The article concludes that online and face-to-face venues for focus-group research are complementary, with online focus-group research opening new opportunities for gathering data to inform advertising research, theory, and decision making. The article also suggests that differences between online focus-group research and face-to-face focus-group research, with respect to group interaction and the ability to obtain information, are being eroded as technology provides greater opportunities to create social presence in an online environment.     

An Analysis of Data Quality: Professional Panels,Student Subject Pools,and Amazon's Mechanical Turk

Data collection using Internet-based samples has become increasingly popular in many social science disciplines, including advertising. This research examines whether one popular Internet data source, Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), is an appropriate substitute for other popular samples utilized in advertising research. Specifically, a five-sample between-subjects experiment was conducted to help researchers who utilize MTurk in advertising experiments understand the strengths and weaknesses of MTurk relative to student samples and professional panels. In comparisons across five samples, results show that the MTurk data outperformed panel data procured from two separate professional marketing research companies across various measures of data quality. The MTurk data were also compared to two different student samples, and results show the data were at least comparable in quality. While researchers may consider MTurk samples as a viable alternative to student samples when testing theory-driven outcomes, precautions should be taken to ensure the quality of data regardless of the source. Best practices for ensuring data quality are offered for advertising researchers who utilize MTurk for data collection.     

Explaining the use and effects of humour in advertising: an evolutionary perspective

Prior reviews have outlined the state of research of humour in advertising and showed that some findings deserve further explanations. This paper makes the point that evolutionary psychologists’ explanations of the functions of humour can provide new or alternative explanations for these findings and suggest new research avenues. The evolutionary functions of humour have been widely discussed in the literature, but advertising researchers have neglected biological nature and biological evolution as additional or alternative explanations for humour in advertising. The paper contributes to the advertising literature and broadens perspectives for research on humour in advertising by reviewing research on the evolutionary functions of humour, by showing how these functions can explain the use, effects, and moderators of humour in advertising beyond the explanations provided in prior literature, and by suggesting new propositions for future research on humour in advertising.     

Maintenance person or architect?

This paper suggests that, while advertising has changed, advertising research has not. Indeed, questions asked of advertising research more than 20 years ago have still not been answered. The enormity of change in advertising compounded by the lack of response from researchers suggests the traditional academic advertising research model requires more than routine maintenance. It seeks an architect with vision to redesign an academic research model that is probably broken or badly outdated. Five areas of the academic research approach are identified as needing rethinking: (1) the advertising problem, (2) sample frame and subjects, (3) assumptions regarding consumer behaviour, (4) research methodologies and (5) findings. suggestions are made for improvement. But perhaps the biggest challenge is academic leadership. This paper proposes the establishment of a blue-ribbon panel to report back on recommended changes or improvements.     

名人代言广告效果影响因素综述

作为一种重要的营销策略和宣传手段,名人代言广告被很多企业寄予厚望,但名人的推荐并不是成功的保证。近三十多年来,国内外学者对名人代言广告进行了深入研究,提出了信源模式理论、匹配理论等多种解释,从名人、产品、受众三方面提取了影响名人代言广告效果的诸多因素,在丰富和拓展了广告心理学研究的同时,也对企业营销实践发挥了重要指导作用。     

Integrating Results from Children's Television Advertising Research

Children's television advertising is rapidly becoming a major concern to government agencies, citizens' groups and researchers in many areas of the social sciences. To this point there has been little integration of research efforts. This article presents a model of the processing of television advertising by children in order to organize and integrate previous research results and to act as the basis for suggesting future directions for research. The authors indicate that more involvement by advertisers is needed.     

Corporate Advertising Pass-through onto the Brand: Some Experimental Evidence

While researchers and managers have speculated that corporate advertising can have an impact on brand knowledge, to date there is no empirical support for such "pass-through." We report on a laboratory study manipulating the presence or absence in a brand ad of retrieval cues for subjects' corporate advertising and their pre-existing brand knowledge. We found evidence of pass-through, but it was moderated by the retrieval of subjects' pre-existing brand knowledge. Our results have theoretical and managerial implications, and suggest a number of interesting opportunities for future research.     

Methodological Issues in Advertising Research: Current Status,Shifts, and Trends

This article presents some self-reflective considerations on the methodology applied in advertising scholarly publications, based on a review of articles in four leading journals: Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, International Journal of Advertising, and Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising. This article first identifies two approaches in the positivist paradigm that exert strong impacts on the development of advertising research: the message effects research tradition in the communication field and the consumer psychology research tradition in marketing. With this background, the article next introduces several research questions to explore which methods have dominated advertising research, the role of theory building in affecting the adopted methods and the number of reported studies, differences across the journals, and the degree to which researchers integrate different methods or approaches (quantitative and qualitative) in their research. A content analysis of articles published in these four advertising journals from 2001 to 2015 helps address these research questions and reveals the current status, shifts, and trends in advertising research since the turn of this century.     

CONTRIBUTIONS TO INTERNATIONAL ADVERTISING RESEARCH: An Assessment of the Literature Between 1990 and 2002

Research in the field of international advertising has produced a large volume of literature. Although some attempts have been made in the past to review this stream of research, there has been no attempt to assess the contributions to this literature by individuals and institutions. This study assesses the contributions of individual researchers and institutions from 1990 to 2002, based on their publications in major advertising, marketing, and international business journals, and the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). The findings of this study offer researchers a unique view of this field and some directions for future research.     

Reframing replicative research in advertising

Given the espoused importance of replication by researchers, there is still surprisingly little evidence of its practice in advertising research. In this paper, we apply Berthon et al.’s (2002) replicative research framework to advertising. A conceptualisation of the relationship between replication, extension and generation in advertising research is offered. The framework delineates eight possible research strategies. These are discussed in turn and illustrated with examples from the advertising literature. The paper concludes with a discussion of the factors that influence the selection of a research strategy.     

The use of sampling methods in advertising research: a gap between theory and practice

In this research note, we reflect critically on the use of sampling techniques in advertising research. Our review of 1028 studies published between 2008 and 2016 in the four leading advertising journals shows that while current academic literature advocates probability sampling procedures, their actual usage is quite scarce. Most studies either lack information on the sampling method used, or engage in non-probability sampling without making adjustments to compensate for unequal selection probabilities, non-coverage, and sampling fluctuations. Based on our results, we call on researchers to revisit the fundamental aspects of sampling to increase their research results’ rigour and relevance.     

The state of theory in three premier advertising journals: a research note

Despite its importance, little is known about the prevalence of theory in the literature on advertising research. Utilising a content analysis of the three premier advertising journals over an 11-year period, it is found that only 17% of articles have made explicit use of theory. Psychology is the discipline from which the greatest number of articles drew their theoretical frameworks, followed by sociology and economics – indeed, theories from marketing and advertising are in the minority. Limitations are noted and implications of the results are discussed.     

Professionals' views of comparative advertising and the scholarly research literature: A review and synthesis

Comparative advertisements that contrast identifiable, competing products or services may be among advertising's most important tactical weapons. Despite nearly a century of use in the USA, growing use by advertisers in many other countries, and decades of scholarly research, some researchers continue to argue that the status of empirical knowledge regarding comparative advertising's effectiveness remains equivocal. This study addresses this equivocality with a review of the research literature and comparisons with the findings of a recent survey of US advertising creative executives. The findings reveal substantial agreement among the beliefs of academic researchers and advertising professionals in regard to when and how comparative advertising will likely be effective. In addition to offering confirming evidence that academic researchers and advertising professionals do sometimes arrive at the same destination in regard to their shared understandings of advertising effects, the findings also point the way toward important directions for future research on comparative advertising.     

Consumer Responses to Homosexual Imagery in Advertising: A Meta-Analysis

Rising support for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, paired with the considerable buying power of this group, has triggered increasing interest from marketers in the gay and lesbian market. Many companies have developed advertising with homosexual imagery to better target this group as well as the mainstream market. The findings on the persuasive effects of homosexual imagery are mixed and do not provide insights on whether and when homosexual imagery in advertising supports persuasion. To resolve the inconsistencies in findings of prior research, this article presents a meta-analysis on the effects of homosexual imagery. The integrated effect size suggests that the net persuasive effect between homosexual and heterosexual imagery does not differ. We find, however, that homosexual consumers show negative responses to heterosexual imagery. Furthermore, the moderator analysis suggests that incongruence between imagery, consumer characteristics, cultural values, explicitness of imagery, endorser gender, and product type results in unfavorable responses to homosexual advertising imagery. These findings provide guidelines for future research and implications for advertisers who intend to address consumers of various sexual orientations.     

Are services advertised differently? An analysis of the relationship between product and service types and the informational content of their advertisements

This study examines the informational content of service and product advertisements and analyses the relationship between the amount and type of information in an advertisement and the type of product or service being advertised. The influence that service characteristics have on advertising strategy is still not well understood. One theory is that services need to be more tangible in order to assist in the consumer decision-making process and advertising can assist with this by providing factual information. The purpose of this paper is to establish whether this theory is recognized and adopted in advertising practice. This is achieved by performing a content analysis. The results indicate that product advertisements contain more information than services, which indicates a discrepancy between advertising theory and practice. The results also prove that there are variances in the amount and type of information included in product and service advertisements. The paper examines these variances and applies existing classification frameworks to explain them. Areas for further research are also identified.