Context effects on responses to advertisements.

This thesis examines, within seven experiments, the effects of programme material in television and radio broadcasts, and editorial material in magazine articles, on the processing of advertisements embedded in that material. Experiments 1 and 2 investigate the effects of television programme involvement, entertainment and enjoyment on advertisement effectiveness. Experiment 3 examines the effects of selective exposure in a study using an experimental design, with involvement, entertainment and enjoyment as the predictor variables. Experiment 4 reports the influence of advertisement type and programme type on advertisement effectiveness. Experiments 5 and 6 test the effect of involvement, entertainment and enjoyment of editorial environments on magazine advertisements, and Experiment 7 details the effect of involvement, entertainment and enjoyment of radio programming on accompanying advertisements. In each experiment, after exposure to the broadcasting or print context material and accompanying advertisements, subjects responded to a series of questionnaires designed to measure perceptions of the programmes and advertisements and memory for the advertisements. The results suggested that in general programme-induced involvement was negatively related to advertisement effectiveness. There was less evidence to suggest that programme-induced entertainment and enjoyment were consistently related to advertisement effectiveness. However, the effects of these predictor variables were mediated by several factors including the operation of selective exposure in the experiment, the type of advertisement embedded in the context, the medium through which the material was presented and the relation of these variables to the human information processing system. A number of methodological issues were addressed. In particular, the importance of not using predictor variables interchangeably was evident in the data. Furthermore, the effects of contexts on memory for advertisements appeared to vary more as a function of the above factors than subjects' attitudes to advertisements. When attitudes to advertisements were measured, positive relationships were observed between predictor variables and advertisement effectiveness.