The Information Content of Comparative Magazine Advertisements

Harmon, Robert R.; Razzouk, Nabil Y.; Stern, Bruce L.

doi:10.1080/00913367.1983.10672858

Cited by 67 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 14 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This might happen because mentioning the other brand dilutes the persuasion because it reiterates the existence of the rival brand. Previous research (Chou, Franke, and Wilcox 1987;Harmon, Razzouk, and Stern 1983) has found that comparative advertisements have more information, and we expect to find similar patterns. In particular, we might expect a comparative advertisement to both increase the marginal information and decrease the marginal persuasion benefit of an advertisement.…”

Section: Explanatory Variables In the Ordered Probit Modelsupporting

confidence: 64%

“…More than 60 studies have applied the Resnik and Stern's approach to measure the information content of advertising in different media (Chou, Franke, and Wilcox 1987;Harmon, Razzouk, and Stern 1983;Stern and Resnik 1991), countries (Hong, Muderrisoglu, and Zinkhan 1987;Madden, Caballero, and Matsukubo 1986), and product categories (Stern, Krugman, and Resnik 1981). The results have varied markedly, even within the same medium, because of the lack of a multivariate statistical analysis, redundant or too broad definitions of information cues, and small sample size (Abernethy and Franke 1996).…”

Section: Data and Content Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Information content of advertising: Empirical evidence from the OTC analgesic industry

Anderson

Ciliberto

Liaukonytė

2013

International Journal of Industrial Organization

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We use data from video files of all advertisements in the OTC analgesics industry from 2001 to 2005 to measure the information content in ads. We propose a simple theoretical framework to motivate an ordered probit model of information content. We find that stronger vertical differentiation is positively associated with the delivery of more product information in a brand's advertisements: brands with higher levels of quality include more information cues. Comparative advertisements contain significantly more product information than noncomparative advertisements. Brands with higher market shares and brands competing against generic substitutes with higher market shares have less information content. Our empirical analysis examines the relationship between market variables and the information content of advertising. First, we classify and fully measure different types of advertising content, as well as the distribution of information cues, within an entire industry. KeywordsSecond, we use an ordered probit model of the number of information cues in advertisements as a function of the market share of a brand, its core vertical characteristics, and the share of the generic substitute. To motivate the selection of an ordered probit we develop a simple and intuitive framework in which firms decide how much objective information to include in an advertisement.The underlying idea behind our empirical analysis is that there exists a trade-off between objective information and other persuasion, subject to random factors intrinsic to specific ads. The amount of time spent on information-as approximated by the number of information cues-has systematic and random components.We find that stronger vertical differentiation is positively associated with more information.We also find that comparative advertisements contain significantly more information than noncomparative advertisements, and that larger brands and a higher market share of the generic version of a brand are both associated with less informative ads. Significant estimation bias results from not controlling for the endogeneity of the decision to use comparative advertising and from the endogeneity of market share.Our analysis contributes to the sparse empirical literature on the persuasive vs. informative content of advertising (see Bagwell, 2007, for a comprehensive survey). To our knowledge, the only

show abstract

Section: Explanatory Variables In the Ordered Probit Modelsupporting

confidence: 64%

Section: Data and Content Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Information content of advertising: Empirical evidence from the OTC analgesic industry

Anderson

Ciliberto

Liaukonytė

2013

International Journal of Industrial Organization

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In other contexts (though not in ours), negative political advertising has been found to contain more information than positive advertising (Brians and Wattenberg, 1996;Harmon et al, 1983;Chou et al, 1987;Joslyn, 1986). For this mechanism to work, however, two requirements need to hold.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 46%

“…Previous research suggests that negative campaigning (Brians and Wattenberg, 1996;Joslyn, 1986) and comparative advertising more generally is found to be more informative (Harmon et al, 1983;Chou et al, 1987) and memorable (Faber and Storey, 1984;Appleton-Knapp and Mantonakis, 2009) than positive or non-comparative advertising, and researchers have suggested this difference as a possible reason for a mobilizing effect of negative campaigns. Contrary to these findings, survey respondents rated the candidates' positive messages as more informative than their negative messages in our experiment (Wilcoxon signed-rank z = −3.83, p > |z| = 0.000), suggesting that any relative mobilizing effect of our negative messages is not due to greater informational content of the negative message.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negative campaigning, fundraising, and voter turnout: A field experiment

Barton

Castillo

Petrie

2016

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

JEL classification: D72 C93 M37 Keywords:Voter turnout Negative campaigning Comparative advertising Fundraising Field experiment a b s t r a c t Why do candidates risk alienating voters by engaging in negative campaigning? One answer may lie in the large empirical literature indicating that negative messages are more effective than positive messages in getting individuals to do many things, including voting and purchasing goods. Few contributions to this literature, however, gather data from a field environment with messages whose tone has been validated. We conduct field experiments in two elections for local office which test the effect of confirmed negative and positive letters sent to candidates' partisans on two measurable activities: donating to the candidate and turning out to vote. We find that message tone increases partisan support in ways that may help explain the persistence of negative campaigning. Negative messages are no better than positive messages at earning the candidates donations, but negative messages yield significantly higher rates of voter turnout among the candidates' partisans relative to positive messages. Positive messages, however, are not neutral relative to no message.

show abstract

“…Second, taking the comparison purposes into consideration, the size of the hotel ads was controlled [31]. Advertisements with size equal to or larger than half page, full-page or two successive full-pages were selected for the study.…”

Section: Selective Criteriamentioning

confidence: 99%