Esther Thorson

The Effects of Progressive Levels of Interactivity and Vividness in Web Marketing Sites

Abstract This experiment examines interactivity and vividness in commercial web sites. We expected increased levels of interactivity and vividness would lead to more positive attitudes toward web sites, stronger feelings of telepresence, and greater attitude—behavior consistency. In addition, we expected increased levels of vividness to lead to the development of more enduring attitudes toward the site. Participants explored four web sites. Increases in interactivity and vividness were associated with increased feelings of telepresence. In addition, increases in vividness were associated with more positive and more enduring attitudes toward the web site. Implications for new media researchers and practitioners are discussed.

THE INTERACTIVE ADVERTISING MODEL: HOW USERS PERCEIVE AND PROCESS ONLINE ADS

Abstract The authors provide an integrative processing model of Internet advertising, which incorporates the functional and structural schools of thought. The model begins with the functional perspective, which attempts to identify reasons for Internet use. Since most individuals enter cyberspace with some goal, or agenda, in mind, the authors argue that a model of online processing should begin with consideration of Internet functions. These functions, according to the authors, operate conjointly with the user’s mode--ranging from highly goal-directed to playful--to influence the types of ads web users will attend to and process. A number of mediating variables, such as skill level, are offered as reasons to switch motives. These variables are conceptualized as having either a deleterious effect, as in the case of low skill and high anxiety, or beneficial effect, as in the case of high skill and low anxiety, on ad processing. Last, the authors incorporate a structural perspective, which seeks to identify and classify Internet ads. The authors offer a broad scheme in which to classify most Internet ads, as well as a number of common features unique to these ads. The authors conclude by offering a number of hypotheses suggested by the model.

Perceived Persuasive Effects of Product Commercials and Public Service Announcements Third-Person Effects in New Domains

A recent but robust phenomenon described in communication literature has been the third-person effect—the finding that in response to mass media messages, such as news stories and programs, people estimate themselves to be less affected than others. The present experiment asked whether this self-other pattern would characterize responses to two types of product commercials (i.e., those that did and those that did not engender emotion) and to public service announcements (PSAs). The authors were also concerned with how accurately people could estimate the effects of these types of ads on themselves and others. Results indicated that for neutral ads, people estimated themselves to be more resistant than others, but for emotional ads, people estimated themselves to be more yielding to influence than others. For PSAs, there were no differences in perceived self and other influence. In addition, judgments of persuasive influence on self and others were markedly overestimated. Perhaps most interestingly, there was both a directional (yielding vs. resistance) and a magnitudinal impact of emotion on the influence estimates.

Television and web advertising synergies

Synergy is a concept that many communication professionals believe in, but demonstrating synergy effects in the laboratory or field settings to identify how synergy operates has proved elusive. A set of experiments was conducted to test the existence of different synergy effects as well as to compare the information-processing model of synergy with that of repetition. As a result, television-Web synergy leads to significantly higher attention, higher perceived message credibility, and a greater number of total and positive thoughts than did repetition. Also, people under synergistic conditions formed brand attitudes through the central processing route, whereas people under repetitive conditions formed brand attitudes through the peripheral route. The implementations of these findings are discussed.

Attention to Television: Intrastimulus Effects of Movement and Scene Changes on Alpha Variation Over Time

Central and occipital EEG alpha were used as an on-line measure of momentary changes in covert attention during television viewing. Alpha was recorded during nine 30-second commercials shown embedded in a half-hour situation comedy. Two time series were constructed for data analysis. A stimulus series consisted of codes representing the presence or absence of scene changes or person and object movement for each half-second interval of the commercials. The alpha series consisted of median alpha scores for each half-second interval, aggregated across 26 subjects. The alpha series was regressed on the movement and scene change series, both of which produced significant increments in R, even after autocorrelational effects inherent in the alpha series were removed. As a validity check on the attentional interpretation of alpha, it was shown that mean alpha for each commercial was significantly (negatively) correlated with recall and recognition of commercial contents. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for further use of continuously-recorded alpha in research on factors that influence attention to television.

The Impact of Celebrity–Product Incongruence on the Effectiveness of Product Endorsement

ABSTRACT The present study examines how different degrees of celebrity–product incongruence influence the persuasiveness of celebrity endorsement. Schema-congruity framework provides the theoretical basis for suggesting that a moderate mismatch between a celebritys image and a products image would produce more favorable responses to advertisements than either a complete match or an extreme mismatch. This study also looks at how consumer characteristics, namely an individuals own levels of enduring involvement with a product category, moderate schema congruity effects. Two experiments were conducted to test these issues using two types of match-up factors: physical attractiveness and expertise of a celebrity endorser. The results show that celebrity endorsements are evaluated more favorably in terms of purchase intention when there is a moderate mismatch than when there is either a complete match or an extreme mismatch. Such effects are found to be more pronounced among participants with higher product involvement than those with lower product involvement.

Social Capital in Rural and Urban Communities: Testing Differences in Media Effects and Models

This study examines whether the effects of the mass media on social capital and related processes vary between rural and urban communities. A distinction is made between indicators of social networks (association membership and neighborliness), social trust (interpersonal trust and community trust), and pro-social behaviors (voting and volunteering). We test nonrecursive structural equation models with manifest and latent variables on rural and urban U.S. samples. Media effects differ by medium and by community type. Newspaper use has positive effects in each model, while those of entertainment TV viewing are negative. Local TV news use has positive effects in only the urban model, while network TV news use has positive effects in only the rural model. In addition, there is a reciprocal relationship between social networks and social trust in the rural model, while the relationship is linear—from social networks to social trust—in the urban model.

The Effects of Television Videographics and Lecture Familiarity on Adult Cardiac Orienting Responses and Memory

This study outlines a psychophysiological model of the role of orienting responses (ORs) in learning from televised lectures. ORs are involuntary responses to environmental stimuli that are novel or that signal the occurrence of something meaningful in the environment. In the present study, ORs were indexed with phasic decelerative heart-rate patterns. The experiment demonstrates that insertion of videographics in talking-head lectures produces ORs in television viewers. It also demonstrates that if lectures contain familiar and therefore easier material for viewers to remember, the ORs enhance learning, but if the lectures contain unfamiliar and therefore more difficult material to remember, the ORs interfere with learning. These results extend the idea that attention to television exhibits limited attentional capacity and suggests that there is a trade-off between peoples ability to attend to structural and informational aspects of the television stimulus.

MESSAGE COMPLEXITY AND ATTENTION TO TELEVISION

Three experiments investigated the processing costs of watching television messages. Processing costs were indexed with a secondary task reaction time measure in which subjects were asked to pay attention to commercial messages while responding with button presses to randomly occuring tones or flashes. Response time to the secondary tasks was used as a measure of attention to the primary task (watching the messages). Audio and video complexity of the messages were within-subject variables, and the channels presented to subjects (audio-only, video-only, or both) was a between-subjects variable. Results indicated that: (1) for a tone secondary task, multiple-channel presentations demanded more capacity than single-channel presentations (video or audio channel only); (2) more capacity was required to process simple video and auditory information than complex information; and (3) complexity of information in an absent channel (e.g., visual information in the audio-only condition) produced the same slowed reaction times as those occurring when the channel was present.

Effects of issue‐image strategies, attack and support appeals, music, and visual content in political commercials

One of the barriers to understanding how people process political commercials has been the scarcity of studies that manipulate the presence of significant dimensions of advertising content so that the impact of those dimensions can be examined individually and as they interact with each other. In this study, four characteristics often touted as important determinants of the impact of political ads were chosen for analysis. Two values for each of the four characteristics were completely crossed with each other by editing from components of real ads for Senate candidates unfamiliar to the participants. The ad characteristics sampled included: (a) whether issue or image strategies were articulated in the scripts, (b) whether attack or support appeals were used, (c) the presence or absence of music in the background, and (d) whether the visual content showed the candidate in the context of his family or performing his professional campaign activities.