Persuasive Advertising - J. Scott Armstrong [204]
9.5 Typeface
9.6 Layout
10. Motion media
10.1 Scenes
10.2 Voices
10.3 Music and sound
10.4 Pace
Conclusions
Persuasive Advertising is the result of 16 years of gathering and analyzing evidence on persuasiveness in advertising, and presenting it in such a way that it can be useful to others.
I have assumed that anyone involved in purchasing, creating, or evaluating advertising can be more effective by using evidence-based principles. To accomplish this, they must have easy access to principles. In effect, this book provides a map designed specifically for those purposes.
Practitioners will continue to produce new ideas on persuasion, and research by academicians will continue to be the major source of evidence on the effectiveness of the principles.
While the analysis of non-experimental data has contributed to the development of advertising principles to date, it has outlived its usefulness. Further progress will depend heavily on lab and field experiments, quasi-experimental research, and meta-analyses. The Internet and direct-response advertising offer opportunities for conducting such experiments. Advertising research firms should join in this effort by providing quasi-experimental and experimental data to test and refine the principles. In short, as in the case for medical treatments, progress in persuasive advertising depends upon the development and communication of evidence-based techniques and principles.
As the field continues to expand, new discoveries will be reported on advertisingprinciples.com (AdPrin.com). I hope that many people will contribute to this effort to summarize all useful knowledge about persuasion through advertising.
Advertising’s ultimate objectives are to persuade people to buy a product, donate time or money to a cause, or support an idea. But the principles underlying what works in advertising also apply to persuasion in other areas of life.
Appendices
A Challenges to generalizing from experimental evidence
B Data on print ads from Which Ad Pulled Best (WAPB)
C Non-experimental data on TV commercials
D Prospect theory and persuasion
E Media allocation methods
F How to select an advertising agency
G Management presentations: An evidence-based checklist
H Written management reports: An evidence-based checklist
I Advertisingprinciples.com (AdPrin.com)
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Appendix A
Challenges to generalizing from experimental evidence
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Those who oppose the use of experimental evidence in the development and assessment of advertising offer many reasons for doing so. I list the most common reasons to help you evaluate the level of confidence you can place on the studies referenced in this book.
First, I list four issues that might raise concern, but that do not apply to Persuasive Advertising:
1. Do convenience samples (e.g., students, mall intercepts) affect the validity of experiments related to persuasion?
Our interest in this book is how people respond to alternative approaches to persuasion under different conditions. For this purpose, the findings from convenience samples are relevant. Convenience samples have been standard practice in experiments for well over a century, not only in medicine, but also in the social sciences as well as in advertising.
When a tangible item (such as an ad) must be shown to a respondent, historically this required in-person interviews. Jacoby and Handlin (1991) found that marketing researchers used mall interviews for 95 percent of their in-person studies (the others being door-to-door at 3 percent and central locations at 2 percent). None of the in-person studies used probability designs to select the subject pool. Jacoby and Handlin also analyzed papers in academic journals that “Described ‘primary’ empirical research and used samples of people either individually or in groups.” Based on a sample of 446 papers from 34 academic journals, they found that 97 percent used convenience samples to select the subject pool.
A substantial number of studies have been conducted to determine whether results