Impact of Death-Related Television Programming on Advertising Evaluation

Abstract

Programming that depicts or implies death constitutes a vital component of daily television broadcasts, yet the impact of such programming on the evaluation of embedded advertising remains unexplored. Using terror management theory, we propose that exposure to routine and commonplace death-related television programming will lead to the differential evaluation of ensuing advertisements depending on whether they are perceived to be of domestic or foreign origin, and that this effect is contingent on the nature of the death-related cognitions at play at the time of ad exposure. Further, the death-related program context effects on embedded advertising are unique—ads at the end, not the beginning, of the embedded pod are affected by programming content. Based on the empirical findings from four studies we identify the cognitive processes underlying consumers' ad evaluation, isolate the pod positions when context effects are observed, and suggest a framework for television commercial scheduling.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors thank L.J. Shrum and Sanjay Mishra for their feedback and Alex Martynov and Prahalad Rangan for software assistance.

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at http://www.tandfonline.com/ujoa.

Notes

1. The literature review (refer to online Appendix 1) is specific to television program context's influence on ensuing ad evaluation, not memory or viewer characteristics or other context (e.g., ad context) variables, which are beyond the scope of this research.

2. An in-group consists of three or more people who construe and evaluate themselves in terms of their shared attributes that collectively distinguish them from other people in terms of “we” and “them” (Hogg 2006).

3. We did not attempt to obtain dependent measures in the other MS-pod conditions (e.g., after four ads, five ads, six ads) or control conditions (e.g., neutral programming followed by filler ads at beginning, middle, and end of pod) as any information gains would have been incremental given the number of participants needed.

4. From a pool of 225 commercials recorded from affiliates in cities away from the study venue, we selected 16 commercials of 30 seconds duration each for products not available in the study area. In a pretest (N = 40) the ads were rated for familiarity and emotionality on a 7-point semantic differential scale (1 = Rational/very familiar, 7 = Emotional/very unfamiliar; Law 2002) to minimize any potential confound. Seven ads with an average rationality score of 3 or lower (M = 2.66) and an average unfamiliarity score of 4.5 or higher (M = 5.20) were selected. Filler ads were randomly chosen for the different studies to prevent confounds due to presentation order.

5. In a pretest (N = 85), participants rated interest and familiarity (7-point scales) for a range of product categories (e.g., laptop computers) following Gurhan-Canli and Maheswaran (2000). We also obtained ratings on the favorability of country of origin (10-point scale; Maheswaran 1994) and attribute importance (attribute list generated by reviewing popular online portals; 7-point scale; Gurhan-Canli and Maheswaran 2000) for these products. We selected a digital camera as the product category, as it had moderate familiarity (M = 4.56) and interest (M = 4.71) ratings. We chose the United States and China as the “domestic” and “foreign” nations, respectively, as their favorability ratings on digital cameras were comparable (M_USA = 8.42, M_CHINA = 7.98; t (84) = 1.53, p > .1). Attributes with importance ratings of 5.5 and higher were used to develop two ads for a fictitious brand of digital camera that varied only in the country-of-origin information in the headline.

6. We did not obtain DTA in Study 1, as proximal measures could induce MS and confound results.

7. Using the pretest information from Study 2, two 30-second scratch commercials for the fictitious brand of digital camera were created that varied only in the country-of-origin information in a two-second voiceover at the beginning of the commercial [“… American (versus Chinese) proficiency …”] and the tagline text [“Made in USA (versus China)”] at the end. During the development stage, comments from participants (N = 22) were used to improve the execution of the commercials.