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- Title
Temporal Variations In The Evaluation of Television Advertisements: The Role Of Key Nonverbal Cues.
- Authors
Balasubramanian, Siva K.
- Abstract
This study seeks to explain the variations over time in viewer evaluations (degree of liking) of television ads. A multiple regression analysis suggests that key nonverbal cues/dimensions explain a substantial proportion of these variations. The large number of studies that directly or indirectly address individuals' evaluation of television ads are dominated by post-exposure measures involving multi-item scales (e.g., attitude- toward-the-ad), which carry some hidden drawbacks. First, post-exposure measures represent global evaluations of the entire ad, and may not provide insights on how individuals react to each of the several segments that span the time-duration of the TV ad. Such insights are potentially invaluable since they could establish a scientific basis to produce TV ads that generate high evaluative impact. Each of the several segments (in a TV ad) includes numerous audio and visual variables, and the analysis of the continuous, instant-by-instant, realtime evaluations of such segments could yield important new knowledge on which variables contribute most to positive viewer impact. Second, post-exposure evaluations of the ad could be biased by primacy-recency effects: the attitude-toward-the-ad measure obtained may be more reflective of the individual's evaluation of the ad for segments he/she is more likely to remember, rather than a "true" global evaluation of the entire ad. The above considerations underscore the need for obtaining "online" temporal evaluative measures of the ad; in simple terms, this involves measuring the individual's reactions to the ad over time, simultaneously while he/she is being exposed to the ad. However, only a few studies have focused on over-time measures of ad-related response: Alwitt (1985) and Rothschild et al. (1988) employed overtime electroencephalographic (EEG) measures of brain activity in response to ad exposure to assess whether they reflect variations in die content of the ad; in addition, Thorson & Reeves (1986) have investigated the effects of temporal variations in viewer liking for programs/ads on memory for ads. Although Äis research follows the spirit of Alwitt (198S) in that it examines the importance of variations in ad content over time, there are key differences: (a) the dependent variable used in our analysis is different: the "degree of viewer liking" toward the ad over time, and (b) we focus attention on key nonverbal cue categories that account for the variations in the dependent variable. In sum, the study attempts to provide preliminary insights on the relative importance of several nonverbal variables in influencing advertising evaluations. The choice of the explanatory variables is primarily motivated by the heightened research attention paid in recent years to the role of nonverbal variables in advertising (Hecker & Stewart 1988).
- Subjects
TELEVISION advertising; TELEVISION viewers; NONVERBAL communication on television
- Publication
Advances in Consumer Research, 1990, Vol 17, Issue 1, p651
- ISSN
0098-9258
- Publication type
Article