The Effects Of Media Context On Advertisement Effectiveness: A Literature Review

This literature review presents the results of an extensive and structured synthesis of the existing empirical study on the influence of contexts on the effectiveness of embedded advertisements through content analysis.The purpose of this study is to provide a theoretic guide for the development of advertising research of China,and help advertising practitioners improve their understanding of the impact of the media context.328 unique relationships between media context and advertising effectiveness were found in 123 empirical studies from 107 related articles.In order to assess the general findings across studies,a formal vote-count analysis was conducted on the coded relationship.Analysis results were as follow:①Media context research around the world has increased quantitatively decade after decade since the early sixties,and especially faster from the 90's.To date,most studies investigating this relationship have been experiments,making use of a homogeneous(generally student) sample,and focusing on television.But the research about internet increases quickly after 2000.②Study found that context characteristics can be divided into five factors,including valence,arousal,liking,context-advertising congruence and objective characteristics. The factors investigated most frequently are arousal,context-advertising congruence and valence.The amounts of media characteristics studied per empirical research have also increased through decades,which mean that researchers concern the synthesized influence of media characteristic more and more to understand comprehensively.③Study of previous studies found whether valence influence advertising memory and what's the relationship are still controversial."Cognitive capacity theory " and "feelings as information theory" are the two main theories and each provides the opposite interpretation.The significant findings for the relationship between valence of the response and attitude toward the ad(Aad) are clearly positive."Excitation transfer hypothesis" and "mood congruency-accessibility hypothesis" both support the conclusions.④Studies predominantly report a negative relationship between arousal on advertising recall,which support by "Cognitive capacity theory ".But as negative findings are generally found in experimental settings,while positive findings are predominantly the result of studies conducted in real-life settings,it can be argued that advertising exposure has a moderating influence on the relationship between arousal and recall.⑤The relationships between context liking and every measure of advertising effects have been found very significant positive.That is,as long as the comprehensive evaluation of media context is high,the effectiveness of advertising embedded will be good.However,due to a limited number of studies,it needs for further investigation about theory.⑥The studies on context-advertising congruence report that it can damage advertising recall,but influence attitude toward advertising, attitude toward brand and intension to buy positively."Prime principle" and "contrast effect" are the main theory to explain those results.Some researches indicate that consistency can interact with the involvement of product and context liking.⑦The results of studies on context attributes are more scattered.Most studies either report non-significant findings,or report contrasting effects.However,the sex,violence or humour programs have been proved to damage the effectiveness of advertising,and cartoon programs increase advertising recall.Overall,context effects seem to be subjective rather than objective.⑧In the discussion,gaps in the present body of research are revealed and possible directions for future research are proposed.