Persuasive Advertising - J. Scott Armstrong [149]
Subjects were randomly assigned either a short or tall glass (each of which held the same volume). They were permitted to refill it with as much juice as they wanted. Those given short, wide glasses, thinking they held less, poured and consumed about 20 percent more juice than those given tall, slender glasses (Wansink and van Ittersum 2003). Drinking establishments might want to use short glasses to increase revenue. Designated drivers might want to use tall glasses to reduce consumption. (Those on diets should use tall glasses.)
In a lab experiment on call-outs, 46 subjects saw a bicycle ad with eight claims. Half the subjects, randomly assigned, received a version with the claims as call-outs on the illustration, while the others received a list. Recall was 1.28 times higher with call-outs (Meyers-Levy and Perachio 1995).
7.10.4. When believability is an issue, use photographs/videos instead of drawings/cartoons
Artists might take creative license in representing a product. For example, a 1926 artwork ad for Studebaker showed tiny people admiring an enormous automobile.
Illustrations can easily lead one astray. Consider, for example, that you received an ad for furniture that had illustrations for the hallway and coffee tables shown overleaf. How much longer is the hallway table?3
I was surprised to learn that the length and width of each table are identical. But even after being told that, my brain refuses to agree because it interprets what it believes to be three-dimensional objects. (This example was adapted from Shepard 1990.)
It is, of course, possible to lie with photographs—they can be staged, altered, edited, mislabeled, or placed in an inappropriate context. For example, in the 1968 U.S. presidential campaign, an ad showed a photograph of Hubert Humphrey smiling beside pictures of U.S. troops under attack in Vietnam.
There are situations in which drawings or cartoons are appropriate. For example, exterminators, such as Terminex, often use animated bugs because people are squeamish about seeing pictures of real insects.
Sometimes illustrations can show what photography cannot easily portray. When Gillette introduced its two-blade shaving razor in 1972, a TV commercial demonstrated how the razor worked. This animated drawing showed the Gillette second blade catching hair that the first blade missed. It is hard to see how Gillette could have used photography to demonstrate this feature.
The earliest use of photography in advertising was traced to a real estate ad in Paris in 1854. However, it took nearly a century before photography had much impact on advertising, largely because of costs and technical issues (Sobieszek 1988).
An analysis of ads in the top ten magazines for each of the first eight decades of the 1900s showed that the use of photography in advertising soared from 18 percent of the ads in the first decade of the 1900s to 82 percent in the 1970s (Pollay 1985). The wide acceptance of photography is partly due to its people’s belief that it provides an accurate portrayal of reality.
Evidence on the effects of photography
The following lab experiment supports the use of photographs:
Print ads with photographs led to more product choices than did line art. Quarter-page Yellow Pages ads for three product categories (e.g., computers, photo developing, and restaurants) were shown to 143 subjects. Those who received ads with photos of products gave higher ratings to the credibility of the ad and product quality than those who received ads with line drawings. These findings were the same for all three product categories. In a second experiment, which used eight product categories, 384 subjects received ads ranging from one-sixteenth to a half page. The subjects who received ads with photographs of products were more likely to select the