Financing media/effectiveness of advertising

[6155GUASTELL@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Have the goodies on the effectiveness of advertising:

In short it works: The persuasiveness of repeated advertising,
e.g., buying the product, doing the recommended action, increases
with greater numbers of exposure to the ad. Here I mean radio or
TV type ads. The catch is, however, that the persuasive ability
of the ad asymptotes at 6 exposures; after that more advertising
does little for the same audience [1]

If we imagine that a radio or TV audience has different clusters
of listeners/viewers according to time of day, and on different
stations, the ad campaigns should optimally rotate their series
of 6 exposures around all those audience packets. The cost of
buying all that advertising would add up big across a nation [2]

In the case of print ads, or signs like "fasten that safety belt"
the ads work IFF the ad is clear about what people should DO,
as opposed to not do, or some vague message like, "safety first!"[3]

The foregoing assumes there is no competition to sell the same
product to undermine the impact of one company's ads. If Company A
does their 6, then Company B does theirs, B would probably get
A's business. So A has to launch a new ad campaign. A Red Queen
situation could develop pretty fast in some types of markets
(saturated) where brand switching is the only way to get business.[4]

Political advertising: Social psychologists like to ask "Who won
the debate?" Turns out that people say the guy who won was the
canditate they liked best before the debate. Effectiveness of
campaigns as a whole: do little to change people's minds, but there
is about 8% of undecided people who are truly influenced one way
or the other by the competing campaigns. In the long run, the
campaign with the most money wins.[5]

All the above assumes that the ads themselves are technically
effective, which is a long story.

There is some truth to saying that all those capitalists do flush
considerable money down the toilet on lousy ads and Red Queen games.

Hope this helps.


Stephen Guastello
Marquette University

[1] From my wife, Denise, who teaches consumer psychology
[2] My extrapolation
[3] Industrial safety literature
[4] My extrapolation again
[5] From social psychology chapter of an introductory psych text
	I taught from a couple years back.