Social context and advertising effectiveness: a dynamic study

Abstract

Consumers of movies, videos, and television programmes enjoy sharing the experience with groups of family and friends. Group consumption or co-viewing of audiovisual entertainment helps make co-exposure to advertisements fairly common across media vehicles and technologies. Research in marketing and psychology has consistently shown that the presence of, and/or the interactions with, others affects cognition. Therefore, co-exposure should sway advertising effects. Still, most media planning assumes that the value of reach and frequency for advertisers does not change over social contexts. The present study investigates co-exposure to programme ‘promos’ as an antecedent of individual consumption of the advertised programmes on people meter panel data. Our findings support and extend those reported in the sparse experimental literature, provide the basis for a theoretical model of social context of exposure, and point to possible research directions for practitioners and academics.

Keywords:

• advertising
• co-exposure
• co-viewing
• television

Acknowledgements

The author thanks IBOPE-AGB Mexico for donating the people-meter data necessary for this research. Additional financial support was provided by the Charlton College of Business.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.