Journal of Advertising Research

AIDS is a fatal though preventable disease with more than 56,000 new cases reported in 1996 alone. Condom advertisements and AIDS PSAs can help prevent the spread of AIDS, but these ads/PSAs often contain controversial subject matter and are thus rejected for broadcast by television stations. A large-scale survey of television station managers was conducted to determine which forms of AIDS messages they accept and influences on their acceptance/rejection decisions. Specific types of AIDS prevention messages that are most and least likely to be accepted for broadcast are identified. The influence of network affiliation, market size, and broadcast band on AIDS acceptance decisions were assessed. Unlike previous studies, we examine the impact of personal ethical considerations of television station management on AIDS acceptance decisions and found several interesting results which could be used by health professionals to increase the ability of gaining airtime for AIDS prevention messages.

7 ads (3" x 2") for information on nonprescription mail-order contraceptives were run in 51 college newspapters. Ads with specific product offerings, apparently directed to males and including offers of birth control literature, drew the most inquiries. Inquiries were also higher from ads placed in papers with larger circulations, and in rural areas. There were no discernible objections from the audience, and no difficulties were encountered in placing copy. About 207 of the inquiries resulted in orders.

The article by Amitava Chattopadhyay and Jean-Louis Laborie is terrific. It represents a rethink and an innovative way to improve what we do as professionals. For that it should be commended and introduced to the industry.

Great creative people in advertising have long known the power of emotion and stories but had little compelling theory and research to validate their instincts. This new book on the interplay between the conscious and unconscious minds of consumers, marketers, and researchers provides convincing support.

An unbiased comprehensive oversight synthesis of three decades of gender-related advertising research is undertaken. Seventy-six articles found in premiere marketing, psychology, sociology, and communications journals were reviewed. Findings of the gender role research indicate advertisements are generally moving toward a slightly less stereotypical stance. Findings of the selectivity hypotheses research indicate females versus males process advertisements differently. Findings of the spokesperson gender effects research indicate controversy exists, and the gender advertising response literature findings assert gender differences in advertising responses exist. Finally, the gender brand positioning literature specifies gender differences exist. The findings are synthesized and implications are suggested.

In order to have a sense about where media planning is going, one must first have a contextual understanding of where it has been and at what place it is currently.

In April 2002, when I was honored to be selected as the chairman of the AAAA, I decided that the focus of my tenure would be making a mark on improving the general quality of advertising in America. I defined that as doing something to raise a critical component of advertising quality to a new level.

The account planning of creative advertising development has been hyped on both sides of the Atlantic for more than 30 years yet there is still little agreement on what exactly it is and what contribution it has made. This article reviews current perspectives on the account planning discipline from the London and New York agencies that pioneered the discipline. Depth interviews suggested that account planning remains a powerful idea for advertising professionals and a major priority for top international agencies. The complexity and depth of feeling that surrounds the topic, however, is striking. Views range from passionate advocacy to open cynicism. This article offers an interpretation of the major issues that emerged and integrates this with research perspectives to suggest an agenda for the wider understanding and successful implementation of account planning. a

Accountability is management s new mantra. The challenge comes from the fact that currently each discipline within the marketing communications plan is measured differently, so there can be no composite scorecard. McCann introduces two models, based on seven Universal Marketing Drivers that assess how these drivers work in tandem, in a discipline-neutral manner. These models can help marketers assess the contributions of each of the diverse disciplines within a marketing communications plan and accurately allocate resources to best deliver strategic priorities.

A survey of over 1,700 Hong Kong adolescents indicates that their smoking-related behaviors are related to their exposure to cigarette advertising, promotional products, and movies. American media and tobacco firms dominate these industries, resulting in strong preferences for American cigarette brands, particularly Marlboro. As a correlational study, this research does not, of itself, address the issue of causality. However, these findings do add one more dimension to a growing body of literature that cumulatively suggests a causal relationship between exposure to tobacco advertising and promotion and youth smoking. a

In verbal, one-way marketing communication, e.g., radio advertising, the only cues that the target customer has are voice related. Competitive and financial considerations dictate that advertisers use the most cost-effective means to accomplish their communication objectives. Using a two-step approach, this study examines, first, the effect of speech rate on young adult listener responses to verbal advertising. The second phase of the study seeks to identify significant differences when different methods of speech sampling (time- or pause compressed expanded) are used to produce the faster slower speech rates. Results indicate that faster speech rates affect the number of affective responses and the attitude toward the message while slower speech rates elicit more cognitive processing by young adult listeners. The use of pause only expansion to produce the slow speech rate accentuates the level of cognitive processing and attitude toward the message. Recognition of these effects allows the advertising strategist to further refine targeted message delivery.

Split book yellow page tests randomly distribute different versions of the test advertisement in the same market at the same point in time allowing direct assessment of the customer pulling power of different sizes or types of yellow pages advertisements. Using the results from 78 split book tests, we find that including trademarks in small in-column yellow page advertisements can have a very strong influence on call rates. Partially confirming previous work, we also find that larger advertisements do generate more calls than smaller advertisements. However, the increase in call rates is not a straight line relationship.

Frequency marketing campaigns have become more prevalent among high-share brands in low-growth categories. As a result, the inability of traditional copy-testing methods to accurately capture consumption-related responses has recently become an important issue for both industry professionals and academics. This paper argues that when dealing with brands that have a high degree of market penetration and that are also likely to exist in household inventory, consumption intentions are more likely to capture these consumption-related responses than are measures of A brand or purchase intentions. Specifically, this study suggests that volume estimates best approximate the actual consumption of heavy users (or of frequently consumed brands) and that likelihood estimates are best used with light users (or with infrequently consumed brands).

The debate about which media metric efficiently measures the effectiveness of a web-based advertisement, such as banners, is still alive and well. Nonetheless, the most widely used measure of effectiveness for banner advertisements is still the click-through rate. The purpose of this article is to review the measures currently used to measure effectiveness in web advertising and to empirically determine the factors that might contribute to observed variations in click-through rates based on an actual sample of advertising campaigns. The study examined the complete set of all advertising insertions of 77 customers of a large advertising agency over a one-year period. A resulting sample of 1,258 placements was used to study the effect of banner formats and exposure levels on click-through rates using analysis of variance. Results suggest that the strongest effect on click-through rates comes from the use of trickbanners ([eta]2 = 0.25) and that other factors such as size of the advertisement, motion, use of and type of announcers all have a significant impact of click-through rates. Implications of these findings as well as limitations of the current study are discussed and directions for future research agendas proposed. a

This study measured to what extent consumers used the internet to displace or reinforce the use of other media as sources of advertising information. The sample was 2,032 households from 5,031 households randomly selected from a midwestern state. The results showed that although internet advertising provided many unique features, it has not displaced most media as sources of advertising information. Many consumers found that internet advertising was a complementary medium based on their favorable attitudes or frequent use of other media advertising. The research also indicated that the reinforcement effects will be likely more evident for the future use of internet advertising associated with the use of billboards, direct mail, magazines, and television. However, the displacement effects may continue to occur for the future use of internet advertising associated with the future use of free community papers and weekly paid papers as advertising sources.

This article is about affective advertising, defined as that which works more on our emotions and feelings than on our knowledge and beliefs. This sort of advertising can be processed effectively at relatively low levels of attention and as a result does not always perform well on recall measures. We compare the most popular recall-based metric claimed advertising awareness against an approach that deduces effectiveness from recognition and find claimed advertising awareness seriously underestimates the effectiveness of the advertising tested.

Advertising effectiveness tests combining surveys and electronic tracking of online advertising are common, and the method is increasingly being utilized within more comprehensive, cross-media methodologies. The validity of these tests, however, has sometimes been called into question because of the short duration between online advertising exposure and survey taking. Using a unique database containing more than 1,600 online advertising campaigns, we find that there is a measurable but weak relationship between time since last exposure and branding effectiveness, indicating the shortness of duration does not have a substantial impact on the validity of these tests.

This article examines the contribution of direct mail advertising to average weekly unit sales of a national fast food franchisee. Two different types of direct mail advertising are used, both independently and in conjunction with local and national advertising. Results of a field study indicate that one type of direct mail (a shopper) contributes significantly to sales when used independently. When combined with national or local advertising, however, the contribution level of this shopper decreases. Conversely, a direct mail insert combined with many others inserts into one single envelope is much more powerful when utilized in conjunction with national advertising. In fact, results show that this latter combination of direct mail with national advertising contributes more to average weekly unit sales than any other combination. Implications are offered and future research is suggested.

As a direct marketing tool, electronic Short Message Service (SMS) is likely to surpass internet-based advertising before the end of 2006. This article profiles heavy and light consumer acceptors of SMS direct advertising texts and SMS direct marketing prompts to watch TV programs. The article includes empirical findings of practitioner campaign evaluations of SMS-TV direct marketing campaigns in U.K. and U.S. markets. The results support the view that younger consumers higher in social class are the most willing to accept SMS direct advertising text and respond favorably to SMS-TV integrated marketing communications. The article closes with a call for true experiments to validate consumer acceptance and use of SMS-TV interactive, commercial, communications via split-run testing.

Children s opinion of advertising and their general skepticism toward it is of the utmost importance to both practitioners and those responsible for advertising control. In this article, the authors detail the development and validation of a scale measuring 8- to 12-year-olds global attitude toward TV advertising. This scale has been built and validated in a French-speaking context following all the steps required by the classical Churchill (1979) paradigm.The authors are indebted to Richard Lutz at the University of Florida for insightful comments on an earlier version of this article.

In this article we examine factors that might impact on web advertising recall and recognition. These factors include the viewing mode, duration of page viewing, and web page context factors, including text and page background complexity and the style of the banner advertisement. Via an experimental design conducted on a student sample, we manipulate these factors over several levels. The key finding is that the longer a person is exposed to a web page containing a banner advertisement, the more likely they are to remember that banner advertisement. We also find that recognition scores are much higher than both unaided and aided recall scores. Finally, web users in a goal-directed mode are much less likely to recall and recognize banner advertisements than users who are surfing a site.

Today s pretesting is based on concepts of consumer behavior that were devised over a hundred years ago and which were largely discarded in the 1980s. What would it look like if we had known, and then applied what we know now, 25 years ago?