30-01-2016, 11:08 AM
ABSTRACT:
This study presents a quantitative examination of the qualitative impact of magazines on advertising effectiveness.The research identifi es 39 distinct experiences involved in reading magazines. We propose that these experiences are a way of describing the media context for ads that appear in magazines. We show that the large majority of these experiences are related to advertising effectiveness. The more readers experience a magazine as “making them smarter,” for instance, the more effective an ad in the magazine is. A context-free control group is included in the analysis. Heterogeneity across magazines is also examined, and it is further shown that these effects hold over the 100 largest magazines in the United States.
The effectiveness of advertising depends on both the quality of the product being advertised and the quality of the ad itself. A third factor is equally obvious, but receives relatively less attention: the media context in which the ad appears. In advertising practice, the traditional concern of media planning is with evaluating the size, reach, and frequency associated with a medium’s audience. The medium itself is most often viewed as a vehicle that provides exposure, or “eyeballs,” for an ad. Any consideration of the quality of the medium itself as something that might affect reactions to an ad, if considered at all, is typically based on subjective judgments of alternative, and otherwise comparable, media buys. Over the years, there have been repeated calls from advertisers,agencies, and research suppliers for research on the effects of media contexts, such as print magazine vehicles, on advertising (e.g., Chook 1985; Marc 1966; Philport 1993; Schultz 1979). Media context can, of course, be construed in different ways, but in our view, it is ultimately necessary to characterize “the quality of the medium” from a consumer point of view, that is, the qualitative experience of the medium.
There are potentially many dimensions of this experience. Fuchs (1964) found that the prestige of a magazine “rubbed off” on advertisements. Aaker and Brown (1972) examine how the “expertise” and “prestige” of a magazine affect ads. Soldow and Principe (1981) evaluate the effects of whether a program is “involving” on ads. Tipps, Berger, and Weinberg (2006) study the effect of “involvement” with newspapers and magazines on ads. Bruner and Kumar (2000) study how the background complexity of a Web page affects attitudes toward advertising. Clearly, there are many dimensions of “quality” that can affect reactions to advertising. The present study goes beyond previous work by proposing a general approach to quantifying how the qualitative experience of the medium is related to advertising effectiveness. The particular medium used is magazines. The fi rst step in our approach is to determine the relevant qualitative reader experiences associated with the medium. Once these experiences have been established, they can be related to the effectiveness of a particular ad appearing in the medium. This relationship will be examined through a quasi-experiment in which readers of a magazine are presented with an ad and asked to evaluate it.