| One of the fundamental questions researchers in mass communication generally and advertising specifically want to answer is how to measure the effectiveness of a message. The purpose of this dissertation is to highlight the usefulness of implicit memory measures for doing just that. By using the transfer appropriate processing framework as a guide, this dissertation will examine the differences between implicit and explicit memory. This comparison will be done by manipulating both how the ad is encoded and the level of cognitive load the participants are under. Finally, the different types of memory performance will be correlated with attitudes to see if and when memory might serve to predict affect.;In a 2 (encoding: conceptual or perceptual) X 2 (attention: full or divided) between-subjects experimental design, participants were exposed to a series of advertisements embedded on news websites. After performing a distraction task, participants completed one of the following memory measures, depending on which condition they were assigned: conceptual implicit memory, perceptual implicit memory, conceptual explicit memory, or perceptual explicit memory. All participants then completed attitudes measures.;Results suggest that compared to a control group, significant priming occurred in both the conceptual and perceptual implicit memory tests such that those who had seen the advertisements performed significantly better on the memory measures than those who did not see the advertisements. Furthermore, for the conceptual measures, how the information was encoded mattered, as those who encoded the advertisement conceptually significantly outperformed those who had encoded the advertisement perceptually. More importantly, only conceptual implicit memory performance significantly correlated with the attitude measures.;Overall, this dissertation provides evidence that implicit memory measures are important to be used within future advertising research studies. These measures represent an alternative and indirect method to assess advertising effectiveness. Furthermore, this dissertation adds to the literature on fluency effects by suggesting that it is conceptual fluency that mediates the relationship between ad exposure and attitudes toward the brands in the ads. |
