The Secret of Television’s Success: After Fifty Years the Debate Continues

Reprinted with permission from WARC

Robert Heath, School of Management, University of Bath

Insights from Hosrt Stipp, The ARF

INTRODUCTION

The arrival of television advertising in 1955 changed the world of advertising more than anything before or since. For the first time, people were able to see moving images and hear sound in their own living rooms. And, for the first time, advertisers were able not just to communicate but to entertain. In a very short period, it became clear that those companies that used television to advertise their products were running away with market share.

The earliest theories of how television advertising worked derived from 50 years of print advertising and saw no mystery at all in it. From as far back as the 1920s, the belief was that advertising was about delivering a persuasive message. And, it was assumed, television advertising—by getting higher levels of attention—would enhance message communication and increase recall and persuasion.

As early as 1962, however, holes started to appear in this theory and, by 1971, the idea that television was even a high-attention medium was being challenged. Since then, studies have repeatedly confirmed how little interest viewers have in television advertising. As early as the 1980s, between 20 percent and 40 percent of the audience was perceived to be leaving the room when the advertising breaks came on (Soley, 1984). By the 1990s two-thirds were doing some other activity when watching television (Clancey, 1994). Already by that time, half of all consumers actively disliked television advertising (Mittal, 1994). And, nowadays, almost everyone fast-forwards through the ads in previously recorded material (Goetzel, 2006). No wonder pundits have for the past decade been telling us that the 30-second television commercial is dead.

Yet television advertising as a way of building brands seems to be far from dead. Binet and Field’s recent analysis of more than 1,000 proven effective advertising campaigns from the U.K. IPA Advertising Effectiveness Awards concludes, “There is little evidence to support the widespread assumption that television [advertising] is becoming less effective. In fact, television effectiveness might be increasing” (2007). How, in the face of widespread audience indifference, can this be the case?

This article reviews 50 years of papers in which the Journal of Advertising Research has addressed the thorny issue of trying to explain how television advertising works.

By way of background, let us start with a true story.

BACKGROUND

A paper written for the fiftieth edition of the International Journal of Market Research describes the launch of a new brand of snack food into the Israeli market in 1999. The launch was supported by a television commercial consisting of “…a pop song with meaningless gibberish lyrics, accompanying a series of surreally linked and sometimes bizarre scenes. In each scene someone is eating the product, but the advertising contained no information as such about the product” (Heath and Feldwick, 2008).

Prior to launch, the advertising was tested among teenagers using traditional questions aimed at assessing its impact and communication. Given that lyrics in the advertisement were gibberish, scores for ease-of-understanding, believability, relevance, branding, and persuasion not surprisingly were well below acceptable norms. The song was especially singled out as not only being disliked but being an obstacle to communication. Recommending against the use of the advertising, the report concluded “This route… hampers understanding and comprehension of intended message” and “Probably a more simplistic route [a simple story line] which emphasises the brand name and benefits clearly would work the best.”

The company was unable to make a replacement advertisement in time and decided to go ahead and launch with the commercial as tested. The results were exceptional: It became the most-recalled and most-liked commercial among teenagers and adults for 3 months in a row, achieving high spontaneous recall with 93 percent liking the advertisement “very much.” The “gibberish” song made it onto the Israeli hit parade. Most important, the brand took a substantial share of the market.

This story offers a direct challenge to the widely held belief that television advertising works by communicating persuasive information and that the medium can be evaluated by the extent to which people recall that information.

The origins of this belief can be traced back to Daniel Starch’s 1923 “Reading and Noting” print advertising model, embellished by George Gallup’s in the ’30s with “Spontaneous Recall,” and by Gallup and Robinson in the ’40s with the “Day-After Recall” technique (Heath and Nairn, 2005). When commercial television arrived in the ’50s, it was not surprisingly the message in advertising that was seen as being the key to effectiveness. As Reeves proclaimed, [television] advertising was “the art of getting a unique selling proposition into the heads of the most people at the lowest possible cost” (Reeves, 1961). And as Barclay, Doub, and McMurtrey observed in the Journal of Advertising Research a few years later, “Recall of commercial content was the principal measure of communication effectiveness” (1965).

And for many practitioners, that is how the world remains: Vakratsas and Ambler, in a 1999 comprehensive taxonomy of advertising models, highlighted the importance of cognition in industry models of advertising, noting “the emphasis given to factual information by practitioners” (1999). This was illustrated in the same year by a description of advertising in Advertising Age as “one-way communication: creating and sending messages…” (Duncan and Moriarty, 1999). Haley and Baldinger’s prediction that “Persuasion and recall … are likely to remain primary evaluative measures in the foreseeable future” (1991) remains all too true for many marketers today.

CHALLENGING RECALL AND PERSUASION

The Journal of Advertising Research, however, always has allowed those who disagree to air their views. One of the major planks of persuasion was that the message in advertising had to be credible, and an article by Maloney (1962) cast doubt on this attribute. An editorial announcing this article stated, “Maloney presents surprising evidence against the conventional view that an advertisement must be believed before it can influence attitudes or behavior” (Journal of Advertising Research, 1962). This, indeed, is what Maloney, a researcher with Leo Burnett, found. And, moreover, he had evidence to back up his assertion. Although it sounds innocent enough, just think of the consequences: if people did not have to believe what advertising told them for it to be effective, how could it be deemed to be persuasive?

Two years later, it was the turn of recall to be attacked. Jack Haskins’s Journal article, “Factual Recall as a Measure of Advertising Effectiveness,” presented evidence that “factual-rational-logical” messages were less effective at changing attitudes than emotional or non-factual messages. And, he asserted, “recall and retention measures seem, at best, irrelevant to… the changing of attitudes and behavior” (1964). His argument seems to have fallen on deaf ears, and it was not until 1982 that Haskins’s assertion was tested. Harold Ross, who tested persuasion and recall in television advertising, found that persuasion—measured by pre- and post-shifts in intention to purchase—was an excellent indicator of behavior but that “Proven recall is a very poor measure of a commercial’s effect on consumer purchase” (1982). Even more damning evidence arrived with Lodish and Abraham’s meta-analysis of 389 split cable-television advertising experiments and their conclusion that “It is unlikely there is a strong relationship between standard measures of television commercial recall… and sales impact of the copy” (Lodish and Abraham, 1995).

Television as Low Involvement

These early attacks on credibility and recall were the appetizer to a much more serious assault on persuasion, mounted by Herb Krugman, a marketing researcher at General Electric who has been a U.S. Air Force psychologist. In 1965, writing in the Public Opinion Quarterly, Krugman observed that much of the content of television advertising was “trivial and sometimes silly” and simply did not fit the traditional persuasion models prevalent at the time. In his own words: “Does this suggest that if television bombards us with enough trivia about a product we may be persuaded to believe it? On the contrary, it suggests that persuasion as such… is not involved at all and it is a mistake to look for it… as a test of advertising’s impact” (1965).

Krugman’s theory was that television viewers were not particularly involved by television advertising but that rather they watched it in a passive “low-involvement” state of mind. In 1971, he published a seminal article in the Journal of Advertising Research that, perhaps, was the first ever to attempt to use psychological techniques to investigate how television advertising worked.

Essentially, what Krugman did was to connect a subject to an electroencephalograph—or EEG machine—and measure the type of brain waves emitted over a period of time during which she was given a magazine to read and also shown some television advertising. He divided the brainwaves emitted into three categories:

• Alpha waves, which indicated relaxation
• Beta (“fast”) waves, which indicated alertness, activity, and arousal
• Delta and Theta (“slow”) waves, which indicated boredom.

Krugman assumed that the difference between emissions of slow and fast brainwaves would signify the level of interest that the subject had in the media being exposed to her. The more fast waves, the more active and attentive was the processing; the more slow waves, the more passive and inattentive was the processing.

After allowing a subject to read some magazines, Krugman exposed her to three television ads as he measured her brainwave emissions. He found little change in the Alpha waves, indicating that the subject was generally relaxed throughout the test. He did find a dramatic difference, however, in the slow and fast waves emitted during exposure to the two media. During the magazine-reading period, the proportion of fast to slow waves was about 4:1, indicating that the subject was alert and interested. When, however, Krugman tested the same subject watching television commercials, the proportions were almost equal, suggesting that the subject’s level of alertness was far lower than for the magazines—sound support for his view that television is, indeed, a medium of low-involvement when it is compared to print.

Krugman’s assertion was a categorical refutation of the received wisdom among advertisers of the day—that television watching was a high-attention activity, certainly higher than reading a magazine. After all, two senses were involved in television watching—sight and sound—rather than just one, so surely there was twice as much going on to attract the viewer’s attention.

Krugman’s findings, however, did accord with common sense. It is relatively easy to pay attention when you are reading text because you have control of the time you apply to the task—you can scan a page, paying more attention to the parts you are interested in and less attention to parts you are not interested in. With television, however, the imparting of information depends entirely upon the way in which the advertisement is made. You have no control over it. And, unless you have already seen the ad, you have no real idea of how interested you are likely to be in it.

Thus, television becomes a holistic experience—you cannot “scan” the data selectively—and, therefore, it is quite easy to believe that one might slip into a passive, low-involvement viewing state. What is more, Krugman found, repeated exposure to advertising—far from increasing alertness—resulted in a further increase in boredom—all of which supported the idea that television advertising cannot be classified as traditional persuasive communication.

Advertising as Reinforcement

Krugman’s 1971 arguments against persuasion were based on psychology. Three years later, a further attack came from another discipline—economics. And, this time, it attacked the fundamental idea that advertising persuaded people to buy by changing their attitudes toward products.

Ehrenberg’s seminal Journal of Advertising Research article in 1974 proposed that advertising worked not by changing attitudes but by reinforcing attitudes already held by a consumer who had extensive usage experience and knowledge of products. He challenged the traditional notion that advertising “works by any strong form of persuasion or manipulation” (1974) and, instead, asserted, “Advertising’s main role is to reinforce feelings of satisfaction with brands already being used” (1974). His “Awareness-Trial-Reinforcement” (ATR) theory gained a great deal of popularity among advertising agencies at a time when the sales effects of advertising were seen by many as hard to discern even in hindsight… and virtually impossible to predict.

At the time Ehrenberg’s article was published, persuasion-based hierarchy-of-effects models such as “Attention-Interest-Desire-Action” (AIDA) still held sway. Ehrenberg identified four weaknesses in these models:

• The lack of empirical evidence showing sales increases resulting from advertising
• The persistence of small and medium brands in the face of massive advertising spend by brand leaders
• The fact that brands usually survive even when adspend is cut
• The catastrophic failure rate of new products.

Ehrenberg established that most markets have few 100-percent loyal buyers and that the majority buy more than one brand. He also found that brand users consistently held stronger attitudes than nonusers, especially in terms of evaluative attitudes. What he could not find, however, was any satisfactory explanation of how attitudes change.

This led him to question the core assumption within hierarchy-of-effects models: that attitude change precedes and drives behavior change. Although Ehrenberg accepted that the traditional idea that “Awareness → Attitudes → Behaviour” made intuitive sense, he found many examples of a sequence in which behavior led to “greater awareness of information to which one is normally exposed…and to change in attitude” (1974). All this challenged the convention that consumers rationally were persuaded by advertising to change their minds and their brand allegiance.

Ehrenberg’s ATR model suggested that advertising could create, reawaken, or strengthen brand awareness and also could be one of the factors that facilitated trial purchase. It also foresaw, however, a role for advertising in converting trialists into satisfied and lasting customers. And it saw repetitive advertising for established brands as primarily defensive, reinforcing already developed repeat buying habits.

A later Journal of Advertising Research article refined the ATR model to accommodate split-loyal purchasers—defined as those who regularly purchase more than one brand (Barnard and Ehrenberg, 1997). In this instance, the role of advertising was to “nudge” split-loyals toward a greater purchase proportion of one brand or another (ATR-N).

Ehrenberg’s idea that advertising can be influential in a post-purchase situation has been supported empirically. In 1999, Katherine Braun created samples of orange juice of varying quality and gave it to subjects to taste, claiming it was a trial for a new brand. After a distraction task, half the subjects were exposed to advertising for the brand. The study found that the advertising confounded the subject’s ability to judge the quality of the juice accurately, leading to substandard product being highly rated. Braun concluded, “Advertising received after a direct product experience altered consumers’ recollection of both objective sensory and affective components of that experience” (1999). Ehrenberg’s ATR-N model generated little enthusiasm among marketers. In 1990, Jones discussing the popularity of persuasion models in the United States, described them as being seen as the “conventional view of advertising… which is all but universally believed in the United States and which sees advertising as… a driving force for the engine of demand… capable of increasing sales not only of brands but also of complete product categories…” (1990).

In Jones’s view, persuasive advertising “increases people’s knowledge and changes people’s attitudes” and “is capable of persuading people who had not previously bought a brand to buy it once and then repeatedly” (1990). Jones’s persuasion model differed from the AIDA in that it saw advertising as using creativity to insinuate new information into the minds of “apathetic and rather stupid consumer [by] the use of psychological techniques that destroy the consumer’s defences; in some cases these techniques are not even perceptible to the conscious mind” (1990).

This contrasted sharply with Ehrenberg’s view that advertising takes “an emotional instead of an informative tone…” (1974) and that “the consumer does not have to be persuaded to think of his habitual brands as better than others, but has to be reinforced in thinking of them as at least no worse” (1974).

The difference is most evident in Ehrenberg’s description of the consumer not as “apathetic and rather stupid” but as being extremely well informed:

Buyers of frequently bought goods are not ignorant of them. They have extensive usage experience of the products—after all, they buy them frequently. As we have seen earlier, they usually have direct experience of more than one brand, plus indirect word of mouth knowledge of others. The average housewife is far more experienced in buying her normal products than the industrial purchaser buying an atomic power station (1974).

The crux of the argument between Jones and Ehrenberg was over attitude change. Jones saw advertising working by changing attitudes, which led to changing behavior. Ehrenberg rejected the idea that attitude change must precede purchase:

It seems to be generally assumed that improving the attitudes of a non-user toward a brand should make him use the brand, or at least become more predisposed to doing so. But this amounts to assuming that people’s attitudes or image of a brand can in fact be readily changed, and that such attitude changes must precede the desired change in behavior. There is little or no evidence to support these assumptions (1974).

Other Models

Krugman contributed a further Journal of Advertising Research article in 1977 in which he proposed that hemispherical lateralization was behind television’s effectiveness as a medium. Essentially, he believed that television advertising communicated to the right hemisphere and not the left. Sadly, hemispherical lateralization was to turn out to be mostly an artefact of brain damage and nowhere near as influential as was thought.

After Krugman’s 1977 article, debate in the pages of the Journal of Advertising Research moved from how television advertising works to a more practical level. For example, Krugman (1984) suggested the radical idea that three exposures to television advertising were enough to achieve persuasion:

• The first is typified by curiosity, establishing what it is that is being presented.
• The second establishes relevance of message and allows the “sale” to take place.
• The third allows completion of the analytical process and initiation of a withdrawal of interest.

At face value, this argument seemed to contradict Ehrenberg’s view that repetition of television advertising was a necessary condition for effectiveness: Krugman did point out, however, that the three exposures were not necessarily sequential and, in fact, may be interposed by many nonattentive exposures, thereby requiring that advertising be repeated frequently. He pursued this latter point in 1986, berating the advertising industry for not giving sufficient credit to “partial and/or brief exposures which is the larger part and condition of the advertising phenomenon” (1986).

In other publications, the issue of repetition was also being investigated. Alongside the traditional persuasive “Central” processing route, Petty and Cacioppo’s “Likelihood Model” (1986) identified a second “Peripheral” processing route in which advertising could exert an influence, “based on affective associations or simple inferences tied to peripheral cues…” (1986). Their view was that, for low-involved consumers, the repetition of emotional cue-based advertising would be more influential than the informational message. This supported both Ehrenberg’s assertion that emotion was the key to television advertising effectiveness, and Krugman’s assertion that repetition was essential. Shortly after the “Elaboration Likelihood Model,” MacInnis and Jaworski (1989) developed their motivation opportunity ability model that, for perhaps the first time, introduced the importance of both attention and emotion into the advertising-processing mix.

The parent of the Journal of Advertising Research, however, the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), recognized that, for the practitioner and researcher, it is the application of theory that generates the greatest value. One of the biggest questions at the end of the ’80s was how (and whether) copy testing of television advertising worked. The ARF commissioned a major study—“The Copy Research Validation Project”—in 1977. Thirteen years later, in 1990, this immensely complex study confirmed, “Persuasion and recall justifiably remain as important copy-testing measures…” (Haley and Baldinger, 1991), but the more surprising finding was “the strong relationship found to exist between the likeability of copy and its effect on sales” (ibid.).

Biel was quoted in Haley and Baldinger as saying that likeable advertising received more attention: “Ads that are liked get more exposure … (and) … are given more mental processing” (ibid). And later, in 1995, Kover showed just how entrenched these ideas became in advertising agencies when he used interviews with copywriters to establish that creativity was seen as deriving from the emotive content of advertising and that there was a widespread belief that emotive content increases attention.

So, at the end of the ’90s—despite the “protestations” of Maloney, Haskins, Krugman, Ehrenberg, Ross, and others—the perceived wisdom was television advertising primarily influenced consumers by communicating a persuasive message; “emotive” elements (such as creativity) still largely were seen as being elements that increase attention toward the advertising and enhance communication.

Classic Excerpt: TelevisionBrain Wave Measures of Media InvolvementHerbert E. KrugmanAuthor’s note: This article was the first to attempt to apply psychological principles and experimentation to the processing of TV advertising. Not all of the conclusions were right, but the approach was 20 years ahead of anyone else in the field.“Our initial EEG data supports McLuhan in the sense that television does not appear to be communication as we have known it. Our subject was working to learn something from a print ad, but was passive about television. If something happened to communicate, that’s fine; if it didn’t, it went by and was gone and no process of scanning or dual attention would worry over its shortcomings. The subject was no more trying to learn something from television than she would be trying to learn something from a park landscape while resting on a park bench. Yet television is communication. “What shall we say of it, a communication medium that may effortlessly transmit into storage huge quantities of information not thought about at the time of exposure, but much of it capable of later activation?…” New Theory: Learning from Experiences “The TV viewer is well-equipped to recognize many things in life seen beforehand on television. So equipped, he startles into an, ‘Ah ha, I’ve seen you or this before.’ This startle is the beginning of an active response, but since this has not been thought out in advance of the time of exposure, it comes out unformed and shapeless. “This suggests the awkward spontaneity of the younger generation, the tendency to act or react in a variety of new but faintly recognized situations where purpose or intent has not yet crystallized. It may look immature or enthusiastic to many observers, but it emanates from the ability to recognize as familiar a wide variety of things in life. “The print viewer, meanwhile, has paused and thought about what he has seen in print, has formed an opinion or mentally rehearsed a plan. When he recognizes something similar in real life he is ready with a formed or ‘mature’ response. “However, print has allowed him to store relatively less information, and so there is much that he does not recognize and to which he reacts not at all. So print man seems very selective, and reacts well or not at all. It looks very mature. “In short, it is suggested that television man, the passive media audience, is a more active but ‘clumsy,’ experience-oriented participant in life, while print man, the active media audience, is a more selective, less active and more ‘mature’ information or message-oriented participant in life. Never mind now which is better. McLuhan was aware of some such difference while none of our mass communication theory was relevant. “As to the question ‘Which is better?’, we are handicapped by our greater familiarity with active and involved types of learning. Our understanding of how passive learning takes place is still deficient, and we are not yet sure how to measure its effectiveness in a fair manner. “While further work with brain waves seems indicated, it should be stressed that there is no evidence or speculative inference in this interim report to suggest that either print or television is ‘better’ than the other, or that fast or slow brain waves are better than the other. Instead, we have a very great need to better understand the differences, and perhaps especially to better understand the significance of slow brain waves. “To do so we must hold in abeyance those historically built-in predispositions in favor of certain behaviors which currently seem more ‘mature.’ “Finally, we have previously pointed out in the analysis of eye movement patterns involving focusing and scanning that advertising which is easily learned requires very little work on the part of the respondent, but that advertising which communicates less easily does require the respondent to be more active. This observation based on eye movement data seems confirmed or paralleled by the present brain wave data. “So the response to television is more passive simply because it is an easier form of communication. The task now is to determine just how easy or hard different communication or even educational materials should be made for optimal learning by various audiences.” Herbert E. Krugman, “Brain Wave Measures of Media Involvement,” Journal of Advertising Research 11, 1 (1971): 3–9.

 

The Decade of the Brain

In another area of research—psychology—the role of emotion was starting to be viewed in a very different way. While Jones and Ehrenberg were battling one another in the Journal (Barnard and Ehrenberg, 1997; Jones, 1997), the U.S. government declared the ’90s “The Decade of the Brain,” and significant progress started in the area of understanding of how people make decisions and process information.

Robert Heath summarised these in “The Hidden Power of Advertising,” a 2001 Admap monograph, and later in “Measuring Emotive Advertising—Implications of Low-Attention Processing on Recall,” a Journal of Advertising Research paper (Heath and Nairn, 2005).

The key findings included the following:

• Emotional content in advertising is processed precognitively, without using working memory, and without the need for any active attention.
• Emotions act as a gatekeeper to our decision making.
• Advertising processing takes place at three attentive levels—active (high attention), passive (low attention), and implicit (no attention).
• Emotions processed implicitly can link to semantic memory and influence behavior without the subject’s being aware that they have been influenced.

These discoveries, linked to increased numbers of satisfactory brands—with fewer and fewer rationally unique sales promises being available—led to consumers’ being less open to influence by rationally persuasive advertising. If emotions do rule the way we behave, however, how is it that they influence our behavior in respect of buying brands? As Gordon wrote in 2006, in a paper entitled, “What Do Consumers Do Emotionally with Advertising?” in the Journal of Advertising Research, “People do not passively receive information about brands… they transmute it into something personally relevant” (2006). In other words, we do not just buy brands; we form a relationship with them.

Brand Relationships

In his classic 1985 “How Personality Makes a Difference” Journal of Advertising Research paper, Plummer described brand personality as “an articulation of what we would like consumers out there in the world to feel about our brand over time.” Although he was talking about personality, it is clear that what he envisaged was some sort of relationship situation, as he imagined those who used and favored brands saying, “I see myself in that brand and that brand in myself” (1985).

Common usage of the term brand relationships grew in the late ’90s, alongside the drive to develop improved customer satisfaction. Blackston (1992) was among the first in the Journal of Advertising Research to identify an overt connection between feelings and brand relationships. He saw brand relationships as analogous to relationships between people: “The concept of a relationship with a brand is neither novel nor outrageous. It is readily understandable as an analogue—between brand and consumer—of that complex of cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes which constitute a relationship between two people” (1992).

His observation suggested that feelings operated equally alongside performance and usage in defining relationships, but most people now believe that feelings tend to exert the greater influence. As Gordon observed in a 2006 Journal contribution, “There is no such thing as ‘rational’ versus ‘emotional’—the two are intertwined. Sometimes ‘rational’ appears to take the high ground, but ‘emotional’ is the underlying force” (2006).

And although experimental work had been done on different types of person-brand relationships and the causes of breakup of person-brand relationships, Plummer identified in his 2006 Journal editorial how neglected the whole area of feelings were in advertising research: “Practitioners acknowledged that effective advertising,” he wrote, “which helps build powerful, lasting brand relationships, is a balance of ‘head and heart.’ Little investment in research and theory development, however, has been dedicated to measuring the heart response” (Plummer, 2006).

Research from a two-part research study published later that year in the Journal emphasized the role of emotion in building strong brands (Heath, Brandt, and Nairn, 2006). The first study tested online a total of 43 current on-air television advertisements (23 in the United States and 20 in the United Kingdom) for their emotional content and rational content. Using a proprietary technique, the authors quantified two constructs:

• The perceived power of the message and rational information in the advertisement (Cognitive Power)
• The perceived power of the emotional content or creativity in the advertisement (Emotive Power).

A second study used an independent online sample to measure favorability toward each of the brands being advertised on a 10-point scale. In this test, respondents were also shown selected video sections of each of the advertisements to ascertain whether they had seen them before. The brand favorability scores then were split between those who did and did not recognize the advertisement, enabling the difference in brand favorability created by exposure to the ads to be calculated.

With these data, it was possible to examine the correlation between the three different constructs:

• Emotional Content (Emotive Power)
• Rational Content (Cognitive Power)
• Shift in Brand Favorability.

Despite differences in advertising styles across the two countries, the results were consistent: emotive power showed a significant linear relationship with the shift in favorability, but cognitive power showed no significant relationship at all.

The findings of this study provided yet another challenge to the established view that television advertising primarily is persuasive. The study also suggested that it is not the rational “message” that drives favorability toward brands; rather, it is the emotional “creative” content itself that makes brands strong. This finding corresponds to research by eminent behavioral psychologists (e.g., Watzlawick, Bavelas, and Jackson, 1967) who have found that it is not what you say that builds interpersonal relationships but how you say it. So, as Heath et al. concluded, “It isn’t the rational message that builds brand relationships, but the emotional creativity” (2006).

Depth and Nature of Processing

The key to understanding these two different views on how television advertising works lies in an understanding of how viewers process television ads.

The traditional model holds that television advertising works by persuading a receptive audience; persuasion is facilitated by high attention; likeable creativity attracts attention toward advertising; and recall is the best measure of advertising effectiveness.

The alternative model—based on work by Krugman, Ehrenberg, and Heath—suggests that the audience is knowledgeable and not especially receptive; that attention toward television advertising is low; that advertising reinforces existing attitudes mainly via emotion; and that recall is a misleading metric.

Both are perfectly valid, loosely mirroring as they do the central (deep processing) and peripheral (shallow processing) routes in the elaboration likelihood model.

It is worth noting that the persuasion model derived substantial support from the work of Craik and Lockhart (1972). Citing among others an experiment by Treisman in which “if the message was attended, more meaningful material could be processed further, and, thus, was retained longer” (1972), the authors asserted that attention resulted in deeper processing and more enduring memories.

It is important to bear in mind, however, that Eysenck challenged this assertion and that Craik and Lockhart were forced to accept that “the notion of depth of processing by itself is insufficient to give an adequate characterisation of memory processes” (Lockhart and Craik 1978). Later still, they revised their view that shallow processing leads to rapid forgetting, in particular accepting that shallow processing of sensory information could persist “for hours, minutes, and even months” (Lockhart and Craik, 1990). This, of course, would explain why early writers such as Haskins and Ross could not find any link between recall, attitude change, and advertising effectiveness.

Most recently, in the Journal of Advertising Research, the distinction between deep and shallow processing has been investigated further (Heath, Nairn, and Bottomley, 2009). Using the prediction that motivated viewers would process television in a systematic “top-down” manner—selectively applying attention to enable them to fulfil goals such as understanding the message in the advertisement or appreciating the creativity—the authors deduced that advertising for products and categories used by the viewer would be given more attention, as would advertising the viewer liked.

Conversely, the authors wrote, unmotivated viewers should process television in a reactive automatic “bottom-up” manner, and attention levels should be free of goals and dictated solely by their response to the nature of the stimulus presented. By experimentally examining the link between levels of attention and a range of different content factors in television advertising, they found strong evidence that, in a natural viewing situation, audience processing behavior is much as Krugman envisaged 40 years ago: low attention, automatic, and stimulus-driven.

More important, the authors found no influence on attention levels from usage of product or category and no influence from liking of advertising and that prior exposure has only a small negative influence on attention. Controversially, they also showed that emotive content (i.e., creativity) far from increasing attention toward advertising, if anything decreases it.

At face value these findings seem rather improbable. Recent research by Pieters and Wedel (2007), however, casts doubt on whether systematic processing of advertising ever takes place, and the Heath et al. findings effectively confirmed these concerns. The implication is that the persuasive model of television advertising, although attractive to marketers, is not likely to work in today’s television viewing environment, because viewers simply are not motivated enough by television ads to pay the high levels of attention required for persuasion to take place.

DISCUSSION

To recap:

The traditional model holds that television advertising works by using creativity to generate sufficient attention to allow the message in the advertising to persuade an essentially receptive audience. The alternative model suggests that the audience is knowledgeable and not especially receptive and that advertising reinforces existing attitudes mainly via emotive appeals.

Is it really possible that advertising can be effective at low attention? Reading further down Biel’s list of hypotheses on the effects of liking, he postulates, “There is less counter-arguing against ads that are liked” and that “liking engenderers trust” (Haley and Baldinger, 1991). As one of the primary reasons for paying attention to advertising is to counter-argue its effect (because you do not trust the advertiser), is it not likely (in a stimulus-driven frame of mind) that ads that are liked will be trusted more and, therefore, will be given less attention?

Expressed in this manner, low-attention advertising processing carries two powerful benefits for television advertisers: first, psychology experiments have shown that emotion is better communicated if less attention is paid, because low attention inhibits counter-argument (Bornstein, 1989). Thus, low attention processing will tend to favor ads designed to exert emotional influence. And, second, the bane of all television advertisers is the specter of wear-out, in which ads are seen so often that they become an irritation. Experimental work confirms that deeper processing causes a downturn in affective responses (i.e., wear-out). When ads are processed in a shallow fashion, however, affective responses are enhanced, and there is no evidence of a downturn after repetition (Nordheilm, 2002). So the viewers’ behavior of paying less attention to advertising they like and have seen before is likely not only to increase their emotive influence but to greatly extend their acceptability. Thus the Heath et al. experimental finding that emotive creativity reduces attention becomes not a problem but a positive advantage to advertisers.

The Changing Media Scene

It cannot be denied that the environment in which television advertising currently operates is very different than it was 50 years ago. A half-century ago, television advertisements were a novelty; now they are a nuisance. In the 1950s and 1960s, products were able to exploit genuine unique product attributes and benefits at their leisure; today, practically any innovation can be copied in less time than it takes to make a television commercial. Once, there were a handful of channels; in 2011, there are hundreds. And, in the early days of television, if you wanted to know about a product, a shopper had to go to the store, or write to the manufacturer; the Internet has changed the dynamic completely.

The Future of Television Advertising

The stark choice facing television is to adapt or die. Logic tells us that television advertising can be persuasive, provided marketers find a way to convince viewers to pay attention to them. But logic isn’t something that interests today’s weary consumers. Nor is television advertising.

The problem is not that television advertising cannot deliver information to consumers: in fact, television ads can get fleeting attention if they contain something worth attending to. They can get attention if a product is genuinely new. They can build awareness for new brands, especially when they are not present in retail distribution channels. They can alert consumers to offers and direct consumers to websites. But none of this will build strong brand values in the marketplace.

What can, in fact, build brand values is the deployment of emotive appeal. It is this element in creativity—too long seen as nothing more than an attention-getting device—that offers the greatest hope for television advertising revenue.

Put simply, the easy option for long-term growth of television advertising revenue is for the medium to do what it has always done best: to use emotion to schmooze the consumer. There is no question that when television viewers pay low attention to advertising, it diminishes their cognitive processing and can impair their comprehension and recall of the message. Yet it is emotional advertising that is most effective at building strong brands. And paying lower levels of attention to emotive ads not only is able to increase their influence but also greatly extend their life and acceptability.

This is also the sort of advertising that performs well when played fast-forwarding in pre-recorded television programs. Research has shown that emotive ideas can still be processed and extracted even when played forward at 16 times normal speed. These studies suggest that our perceptive powers are far better than is generally supposed. More research on this is needed.

Other Opportunities

In recent years, marketers have started to appreciate the power of product placement, arguably the most low-attention television advertising of all. Companies such as The Coca-Cola Company have known for decades that having a product incidentally processed in context in films and television programming is infinitely more effective than trying to use advertising to persuade people to buy.

Another critical change that advertisers have realized is that a generation of digitally savvy consumers is anything but “apathetic and rather stupid.” The Internet has put vast quantities of information at the fingertips of vast numbers of people. The idea that anyone can be persuaded through argument to buy a product might still apply online, and might be supported by television. No longer, however, can it be seen primarily as the job of the television advertisement.

So the future of television advertising is almost certainly not going to be about persuading viewers by imparting factual information about brands, nor is it going to be about using creativity to get viewers to pay attention so that they recall this information better. The future is going to be about insinuating enticing emotional ideas into the mind of the consumer and using creativity to link these to the brand. In this world, low attention might be seen not as an impediment, but as a positive advantage.

Robert G. Heath is a lecturer at Bath University School of Management and a past visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School. His research specialty is advertising processing at low attention levels. In the last 10 years, he has published numerous papers and lectured in more than 20 countries around the world. His monograph, “The Hidden Power of Advertising,” has been translated into four languages and is on its seventh U.K. reprint. Dr. Heath is a fellow of the U.K. Market Research Society, vice president of the European Advertising Academy, and a member of the advisory board for the Future of Advertising project. Email: r.g.heath@bath.ac.uk

INSIGHTS: TELEVISION IN CONTEXT

Horst Stipp

Television needs to adapt to the new media environment. Logic tells us that television advertising can be persuasive, provided marketers find a way to convince viewers to pay attention to them. But logic isn’t something that interests today’s weary consumers.

The United States also was the first country in which the dominance of television advertising was questioned. During the 1990s, as computer penetration and Internet access increased and the term electronic superhighway became popular, many predicted “the end of television as we know it.”

In the eyes of prominent, highly regarded new-media experts such as Nicholas Negroponte and many others, there was very little room for television on that digital highway. It was, therefore, not surprising that media executives—and advertisers—started to monitor the increasingly important role of the Internet not only with great interest but with some concern.

In a time of rapid technological change and profound changes in consumer behavior, it was very difficult to make predictions. And many early forecasts about the role of television in a digital world were erroneous. During the last decade, evidence mounted that most consumers were using their television sets and the Internet and that television usage was not declining. As a result, forecasters, media executives, and marketers stopped talking about the disappearance of television and began focusing on consumers’ use of different platforms to access content and advertising. The question became: How can advertising on television and the Internet work together and be made more effective?

Despite this more optimistic and, if you will, more realistic outlook, concerns about television advertising persist, fueled by a large number of negative voices predicting “the end of television advertising as we know it.” One might argue that there is some hyperbole in these headlines and pronouncements. Even if we discount that aspect, however, there still is rather strong consensus among trade journalists, so-called media experts, and many academics that the rise of the Internet can have only negative effects on the role of television advertising.

Fortunately, research helps us get beyond opinions. The Journal of Advertising Research started to play a pivotal role in providing a platform for research on the role of advertising in the emerging digital world more than 10 years ago, when the Journal devoted a special issue to “Research Untangles the World Wide Web” (1991, p. 1).

That special issue included a paper on the interactions between computer and media usage, a precursor to studies on such interactions with regard to advertising. Those subsequent studies have shown that—although sometimes they compete for consumers’ time—television and the Internet can work together extremely well as advertising media and that well-coordinated multi-media campaigns work better than those in one medium only.

Recently, research has provided evidence that addresses the still widely held assumption that the rise of the Internet means a negative impact on television advertising. These studies have shown that the new media environment is creating new advertising effects—that the new multi-platform media environment provides new opportunities for television ads to stimulate purchases. In fact, viewers’ broadband access and search capabilities close to their television set make it easy for them to obtain more information on a product that they have just seen advertised on TV (Zigmond and Stipp, Journal of Advertising Research, 2010).

The research shows that television advertisements can drive consumers to go online to get more information about a product—a possible precursor to an actual sale. Most product-specific increases in Google search queries occurred within a minute or so of a television commercial—evidence that viewers were heeding the broadcast messages even as they were “multi-tasking.”

In short, the data suggest that simultaneous use of televisions and PCs facilitates an important television advertising effect—consumers taking an immediate step to obtain more product information—that did not exist prior to the introduction of efficient digital search engines. Certainly, media multi-tasking may mean that some commercials will be ignored. The data do suggest, however, that—in contrast to speculation made in the absence of solid data—television messages continue to reach consumers who use television and the Internet simultaneously. And even more important, the data show that new media—specifically Internet search—provide new opportunities for marketers to reach consumers and enhance the impact of their television messages.

Horst Stipp has been involved in media research for more than 30 years. Before he joined the Advertising Research Foundation as EVP, Global Business Strategy, he was svp/strategic insights and innovation in the research department of NBC Universal in New York, where he oversaw marketing and consumer research for NBCU’s television networks and its new digital platforms.

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