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.