Effects Of Humor In Television Advertisement

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

MBA (3rd Semester)

Group-A

ID: 37

DATE: 04th May 2012

Institute of Management Sciences, Hayatabad, Peshawar.

Introduction:

Advertising is of great importance in today’s world of competition, as it is ever present and one cannot avoid it. Advertising techniques have become more sophisticated and is much appealing to the people. As the world has become very much busy and no one can spare time to observe or listen TO long advertisements, so it is very much important for the organizations to know what to communicate and how to communicate effectively in few seconds.

The use of humor as a basis for advertising messages has emerged as a popular mean of marketing communication over the years. Humor is one of the most useful elements to enhance the effectiveness of the message conveyed through the advertisement by presenting some aspects of the ads in out of due proportion creates a high sense of humor.

Humor element has been extensively used in the advertisements of consumer product on TV, radio, and in print media. The usage range estimates from 15% to over 40% (Kelly and Solomon 1975; Markiewicz 1974). The wide use of such practice is the rooted belief that humor creates desirable effects in gaining attention and persuading consumers to adopt products.

Weinberger & Spott (1989) argued that 24.4% of prime time television advertising in the U.S. is meant to be humorous. In regard to the advertisement budget in national media more than $150 billion per annum is spent, out of that amount 10% to 30% is paid for the placement of advertisements that are having humorous elements (Weinberger et al. 1995). The advertising scholars have studied the effects of humorous advertising campaigns on advertising effectiveness (e.g. Markiewicz 1974; Cantor & Venus 1980; Belch & Belch 1983; Duncan et al. 1983; Gelb & Pickett 1983; Sutherland & Middleton 1983; Madden & Weinberger 1984). Understandably, a considerable amount of effort has been spent on investigating the relationship between humor and a diverse array of response variables.

Research Background:

Advertisement is an art to attract mass audience towards the subject which may or may not be of their interest. This goal can be achieved by making exaggeration or by developing different types of message appeals which are quite out of the way and the people are compelled to look at them and think for a pause. Now a day’s most of the advertisers are using humorous appeal in their advertisements because it gives them favorable results. The extensive usage of humorous appeal in advertisement compelled different researchers to study its advertising effectiveness. Sternthal and Craig (1973) were the first who reviewed the humor literature. Academic researchers stated inconsistent results on the effectiveness of humour in ads, but the absence of systematic empirical results contrasts with humour’s widespread use (Markiewicz 1974) and the intuitive belief of advertisers that humour in ads enhance persuasion (Madden & Weinberger 1984). Considerable anecdotal evidence suggests that humorous advertisements can be effective in selling products in many diverse product categories such as soft drinks, cars and insurance (Markiewicz 1974). In addition, research in advertising has investigated the effects of humorous advertisements on many other response variables such as memory, advertising liking, brand attitude and purchase intention. Several studies have concluded that advertising liking could contribute significantly to an advertisement’s effectiveness in terms of recall, brand preference or persuasion (Du Plessis 1994; Hollis 1995). Even though there has been considerable research, the findings fail to show a systematic effect of humour on recall, recognition and ad liking.

Furthermore, few studies have focused on the differences of humour effects across product categories. A rule of thumb among advertising practitioners is to avoid humorous advertising for high-involvement products because the results may be counterproductive. Because the advertising objective is often to get high brand recall through high attention, it is important that advertising practitioners understand the exact effects of humour appeal compared with non-humorous advertising. If humour is indeed more effective at grabbing attention, supporting high recall and aiding message comprehension, advertising practitioners may be wise to add a few laughs to their advertising messages.

Specific Overview:

The main reason of my research is to examine the effects of humorous advertising on the consumer attitude and memory. Two dependent measures of advertising effectiveness i.e. attitude toward the advertisement and advertisement recall (aided and un-aided) will be used to investigate perceived humor in advertisement. I will also try to examine the effects of the audience factor i.e. size of the audience.

Rationale or Scope of the Research:

The primary focus of previous studies of the effects of humorous advertisements has been on cognitive and affective aspects of advertising effectiveness. The purpose of this study is to add mediating variables such as gender and audience factor to provide insight into the differences of humorous ads on consumer attitude and memory aspect.

Problem Statement:

Research will focus two areas of the problem.

Effects of Humorous Advertisement on Consumer Response

To what extent mediating variables influences consumer responses

Research Hypothesis:

The above discussion suggests the following three hypotheses:

H1: Perceived humor in advertisements has a positive effect on the consumer attitude towards the advertisement.

H2: Perceived humor in advertisements has a positive effect on the consumer unaided and aided ad recall.

H3: Male Audience perceive advertisements to be more humourous than female audience

H4: Increased size of audience positively influences the degree of perceived humor

Research Objectives:

The study aimed to see the effects of humorous advertisements on consumer’s responses. The major research question is: to what extent do gender and audience size influences cognitive response (memory) and affective responses (advertising liking and attitude toward the advertisement).

Limitation:

Every study has its own limitations; as far as this study is concerned it will be limited within the perspective of Pakistan. Besides this humor will be treated and measured as a unitary form rather considering different types of humorous effects. Last but not the least methodological concerns may exist, because I will be using university students to rate the humorous advertisements, as younger people are more likely than older people to rate advertisements as humorous and that younger people’s categories of humor are different from those of older people.

Literature Review:

The first literature based on humor was reviewed by Sternthal and Craig (1973), who stated that the perceived humor that bring a smile and laughter by the audience from a particular message or content can be regarded as humourous advertisements. Although the literature they have analyzed is small, and not specific to advertising, but their positive results regarding the effects of humour opened up new vistas for future studies on the effects of humour.

After Sternthal and Craig’s review, Murphy et al. (1979) examined recall in TV program and also manipulated the moods i.e. humorous and non-humorous in the commercials. The two types of ads were placed in the three prime time program environment i.e. situation comedy, documentary and action/adventure.

Their laboratory result found that overall ad recall is higher for humorous ads than for non-humorous ads. The result also concluded that program environments had an effect on the unaided recall of humorous commercials and the products promoted, while on the other hand it did not affect aided recall. (Murphy, et. al, 1979).

In 1980 Cantor and Venus tested the humour effects in radio advertisements on memorability and persuasiveness in a quasi-natural setting. The conclusions drawn by their study also support the Sternthal and Craig results.

Various studies conducted by advertising practitioners have shown that humor element in the advertisements is one of major reasons for grabbing audience attention. Furthermore, 55% of advertising research executives believes humor to be superior to non-humor in gaining attention (Madden and Weinberger 1984).

Madden and Weinberger (1982) studied the effects of humorous ads on attention level in actual magazine ads, Stewart and Furse (1986) examined the effects of humor on attention in television ads, and Weinberger and Campbell (1991) tested the humor effects on attention in radio ads. All of these studies found a positive impact of humorous ads on attention.

Other researchers like Gelb and Pickett (1983) and Spotts et al. (1997) provide theoretical discussions of how humorous advertising may affect consumer’s responses. These discussions consider the use of humorous messages, which can create some positive (favorable) attitudes towards the advertised brand through a transfer of effect created by the ad to the brand (Ray & Batra 1983; Holbrook & O’Shaughnessy 1984; Mitchell 1986). Belch and Belch (1983) have also found similar results. They found that humorous messages are evaluated more favourably by the audience than serious messages, and they produce more positive perceptions of advertiser credibility, more favourable attitudes towards the ad, and more favourable cognitive responses. However, attitude towards using the advertised product (in this case the product was the services of Federal Express) and purchase intention were not affected differently by serious vis-à-vis humorous messages.

Lammers and colleagues (1983) also tried to understand the persuasive effects of humour by using trace consolidation theory. They hypothesised that a more humorous message would increase persuasion-related measures (cognitive responses and attitude) in the long run. It was found that when cognitive response measures were taken immediately after subjects were exposed to ad materials, there was little difference between the serious and humorous ads. However, when cognitive response measures were delayed, the humorous appeal produced more cognitive responses than the serious appeal. It was also found that most of the increased cognitive activity came in the form of pro-argumentation. They concluded that humorous appeal may be more effective than serious appeal because humour, in the long run, stimulates more favourable cognitive responses.

Belch and Belch (1984) demonstrated in a later study that unaided recall and intention to use Federal Express, designed as a measure of persuasion, did not reveal any significant effect of humor, number of exposures, and the interactions between the two. These results however are contradicted by another study (Gelb and Zinkhan 1985) which found that humor can be used to improve commercial effectiveness and that perceived humor significantly declines as the number of repetitions increases.

Duncan et al. (1983) re-assessed the humour effects on advertising comprehension by focusing on type of humour measurement (manipulated vs. perceived) and humour location in the advertisement. Their results also confirmed the results of previous studies about the effects of humour on advertising comprehension.

Duncan and Nelson (1985) also found that humour can increase attention paid to an ad, improve advertising liking, reduce irritation experienced from the commercial and increase product liking. Just as in previous studies, however, humour did not have any influence on purchase intention. They concluded that humorous ads seem to be more appropriate for generating awareness than for generating persuasion or purchase intention.

Several studies have concluded that advertising liking could contribute significantly to an advertisement’s effectiveness in terms of recall, brand preference or persuasion (Du Plessis 1994; Hollis 1995). As Du Plessis (1994) and Walker and Dubitsky (1994) stated, commercial liking (attitude towards the ad) relates positively to advertising recall. One theoretical background for this relationship is that likeable or well-liked advertisements can affect an individual’s information processing by creating positive arousal, increasing the memory of the advertised material, and creating more favorable judgments of the advertisement message (Edell & Burke 1986; Aaker & Myers 1987).

Similarly Speck (1987) examined the attention effects in laboratory test by comparing humorous ads with non-humorous on four attention measures i.e. initial attention, sustained attention, projected attention and overall attention. The results favor humorous ads on each of the attention measures in comparison to non-humorous ads.

The attention attracting ability of humor has also been demonstrated in education research (Powell and Andresen 1985; Zillmann et al. 1980). In the review of the education literature, Bryant and Zillmann (1989) conclude that humor has a positive effect on attention; however, they caution that "unqualified direct evidence for the effects of using humor in non-mediated classroom instruction is still wanting" (p.59). The cautionary stance taken by Bryant and Zillmann is appropriate for all the humor-attention studies, while the result seem to indicate a positive impact on attention.

In education research, the effect of humor on comprehension is typically measured via a written test. The study of Ziv (1988) indicates that humor can significantly improve learning. The Ziv experiments compared an introductory statistics course that was presented without humor with a course that included relevant humor. Both teacher and lecture materials were held constant. The level of learning was measured at the end of the semester by a standard objective departmental final exam. The average score of the humor treatment class on this exam was over ten percentage points higher than the average score in the non-humor class. Ziv replicated this experiment with two psychology classes and found very similar results. The work conducted by Ziv is supported by other non-advertising researchers (e.g., Chapman and Crompton 1978; Davies and Apter 1980; Gorham and Christophel 1990; Kaplan and Pascoe 1977; Vance 1987; Zillmann et al. 1980). This non-advertising literature also supports the hypothesis stated above that humor type may moderate the impact of humor on comprehension. The education literature also points out that relatedness of humor to the message appears to be very important with regard to comprehension than those employing un-related humor.

Recently, advertising scholars have used a different approach toward investigating humor effects, focusing on moderating, or mediating variables on the effects of humor, such as advertising repetition, prior exposure to ad messages, and audience size.

Zinkhan and Gelb (1990) argue that humor has a social dimension and that if the audience listening to or watching a commercial consists of more than one person, then the social setting dimension increases the likelihood that a message will be perceived as humorous, even after repetition. Their proposition is based on the findings of several studies in this area (Butcher and Whissell 1984; Aiello et al. 1983; Brown et al. 1982). Similarly Chattopadhyay and Basu’s (1990) study found that the effect of humor on consumer attitude and choice behavior was moderated by the message recipient’s prior evaluation of the advertised brand. When prior brand evaluation is positive, humorous ads are more effective than non-humorous ads, and vice versa.

Zhang and Zinkhan (1991) studied the effects of humor in ads in relation to ad repetition and size of audience. They found that humorous ads tend to produce higher levels of perceived humor, positive brand attitude and brand information recall. However, ad repetition has no influence on perceived humor and overall effectiveness of advertising. Further Zhang (1996) also studied the effects of humor in print ads using "need for cognition" as a mediating variable and found that the humor effect is moderated by individual differences in need for cognition.

The study of the Chung & Zhao (2003) examined the moderating effects of product involvement on the effects of humour on memory and attitude towards the advertisement by using multi-year survey of responses to commercials shown during the Super Bowl. The findings of Chung & Zhao (2003) reveal that humorous advertisements are more effective in the low involvement products than in high involvement products in terms of attitude towards the advertisements. Furthermore, results show that humorous advertisements are more effective in low-involvement products in terms of memory and attitude towards the advertisement.

In sum, previous research has failed to prove consistently superior persuasive effects of humorous ads over non-humorous ads. The absence of empirical results contrasts with humor’s widespread use in many different products (Markiewicz 1974) and the intuitive belief of advertising practitioners that humor in ads enhance persuasion (Madden & Weinberger 1984). Most studies measuring the effects of humorous ads on recall and comprehension suggest that findings are mixed; that is, some found positive effects and others found negative effects. However, most studies of source credibility and liking of source found that humorous ads have a positive influence. Finally, several studies found that humorous ads do not have a positive impact on choice behaviour, such as purchase intention.

Data and Methodology:

Sample Frame:

The sample frame of this research will be the students of Institute of Management Sciences.

Sample Design:

District Peshawar will be selected for data collection. However the important reasons for selecting district is the accessibility to this area easily.

Design and Size:

This sample size of 100 students will be taken as a subject, all of whom will be undergraduate or graduate business majors in a large urban colleges and universities of district Peshawar. Minimum 30% of the subjects will be of females. The stimulus TV ads will be of telecommunication service providers.

Data Type:

Research data will be analyzed through quantitative approach as qualitative analysis only described things and relies on experiences and past literature rather than experimentation.

Data Source:

Mostly primary data will be used from respondents through a structured questionnaire, as I have to do a lot of experiments but for supporting my arguments secondary data will also be used which consists of Books, Journals, Websites and articles which is used in literature reviews for effectiveness of research.

Variables of Interest:

In this study perceived humor, ad recall and attitude towards ad constitute the three dependent variables of interest. These variables are expected to be related. The key independent variable is attitude towards the humorous ads, while ad repetition and audience factor (Gender and size of the audience) will be used as a intervenient variables.

3.2 Theoretical Framework

Cognitive and affective effects of humour

Humour’s effects on the cognitive process have usually been measured in terms of memory and comprehension. In advertising research, the emphasis has been on memory rather than on comprehension (Du Plessis 1994). Advertising researchers have identified recall and recognition as processes that access memory traces of commercial messages. Although the recall and recognition to measure advertising effectiveness is a long-standing debate (see Du Plessis (1994) for a review), the fundamental difference between the two is that recall is measured by asking subjects to specify the stimulus without aid, whereas recognition is measured by asking subjects to identify whether they have seen or heard the stimulus before. Krugman (1986) argues that recall and recognition measures are different in nature and suggests that the advertising industry has failed to make the distinction.

There is no simple way to decide which method is most useful. In some situations, advertising research requires either recall or recognition measures; in other cases, both recall and recognition are required. The threshold theory posits that recall and recognition measure the same memory but that recognition requires a lower threshold of familiarity (Kintsch 1970). However, according to the dual-process hypothesis (Anderson & Bower 1972), recall consists of two steps – memory search and recognition. In this sense, recognition is a sub-process of recall. To recall items, a subject generates possible candidates for recall during the search process and then selects items through recognition. It is therefore a logical explanation that recognition is less sensitive than recall and understandable that recognition scores are substantially higher than recall scores. Thus to gain higher recall, a stronger encoding process and more frequent exposure is needed.

Humour’s effects on recall and recognition may be explained by operant conditioning theory. As Nord and Peter (1980) explain, operant conditioning occurs when the probability that an individual will emit one or more behaviours is altered by changing the events or consequences that follow the particular behaviour. Unlike information-processing theory, operant conditioning views humour as a reward for listening to the advertising message (Phillips 1968).

Therefore, a humorous advertisement could be better understood and recalled than a similar non-humorous advertisement because humour was a positive reinforcement. This better memory may also be explained by the positive impact of emotional arousal (effect) to memory. Ambler and Burne (1999) posit that if consumers are emotionally aroused while watching commercials, those commercials are more likely to be recalled by them. Thus they argue that advertising with high affective components is more likely to be remembered by consumers. In this sense, it is possible that consumers can be emotionally aroused through watching humorous advertisements and this emotional arousal in turn affects consumers’ memory over advertisements. Another possible rationale for the effects of humour is Helson’s adaptation-level theory (1959), which deals with the capacity of a stimulus to attract attention. Each stimulus that an individual encounters becomes associated with an adaptation or reference level. Thus attention is attracted when the individual perceives the focal stimulus to be plainly different from its reference stimuli. In this case, humour specific to an advertising context or perceived as exceptional will be noticed because, in general, unique advertisements are learned and recalled better than non-humorous commercials. Therefore, the first hypothesis regarding the humour effect is as follows:

H1: Degree of perceived humour in an advertisement will be positively related to the unaided and aided recall.

As indicators of advertising effectiveness, Attitude towards the ad (hereafter Aad), Attitude towards the brand (hereafter Ab) and Purchase Intention (hereafter PI) are usually examined. Many studies have reported Aad as a mediator of advertising effects on Ab and PI (Mitchell & Olson 1981; Lutz 1985; MacKenzie et al. 1986; Holbrook & Batra 1987). In 1981, Mitchell and Olson first introduced the notion that consumers’ choice behaviour is likely to be influenced by attitude towards the advertising stimulus. Mitchell and Olson (1981) proposed, and found empirical support for, the mediational effects of attitude towards the ad. They suggested that Aad should be considered as distinct from beliefs and brand attitudes. Using a classical conditioning approach, they reasoned that the pairing of an unknown brand name (unconditioned stimulus) with a highly valenced visual (conditioned) stimulus probably causes the transference of affect from ad to brand.

Researchers have since shown that Aad, which is defined as an affective construct representing feelings of favourability/unfavourability towards the advertising itself, mediates the effects of advertising content on Ab and consumers’ Acb (Attitude towards choice behaviour) (Mitchell & Olson 1981; Shimp 1981; Lutz 1985; MacKenzie et al. 1986; MacKenzie & Lutz 1989). This mediating role of Aad has been found continuously in many other consumer studies (Belch & Belch 1983; Gelb & Pickett 1983; Park & Mittal 1985; Zinkhan & Zinkhan 1985; Park & Young 1986; Zhang 1996).

Recently, however, some studies have found the reverse relationship between Aad and Ab (see e.g. Madden & Ajzen 1991). That is, in some cases, consumers’ prior attitudes towards the brand also influence positively or negatively their attitudes towards the advertisement of that brand (Machleit & Wilson 1988). Thus, in a familiar brand, attitude towards the advertisement will be influenced by consumers’ prior attitude towards the brand.

In the advertising area, the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) Copy Research Validation project has emphasised the role of ‘liking’ a commercial as an important evaluative measurement (Haley & Baldinger 1991). The basic question relating to commercial liking is whether likeable advertising is inherently more effective than less likeable advertising. In broader terms, there are two primary rationales to explain how ad liking might contribute to advertising effectiveness.

The first has to do with cognitive processing. If consumers like the advertising they are more likely to notice and pay attention to the ads and more likely to assimilate and respond to the advertising message.

The second rationale has to do with affective response. According to Lutz’s (1985) affect transfer model, if consumers experience positive feelings towards the advertising, they will associate those feelings with the advertiser or the advertised brand. Thus the more the ad is liked, the more positive feelings are created towards the brand. As seen in previous studies, several advertising scholars have found that perceived humour in an advertisement has an impact on the message receiver’s attitude towards the ad (Belch & Belch 1983; Gelb & Pickett 1983). That is, the more humour the receiver perceives in the advertisement, the more favourable attitude towards the ad the receiver has. This finding is also confirmed by Chung and Zhao (2000). Thus the second hypothesis is suggested:

H2: Degree of perceived humour in an advertisement will be associated positively with the attitude towards the ad.

Mitigating Factors of Humor Effect

Humor and Repetition

Several authors have studied the effect of repetition and humor in advertising. Belch (1982) found that consumers' cognitive responses follow separate patterns depending on the number of repetitions. Positive responses do not decline over repetitions as has been predicted by the two-factor theoretical repetition effect model (Berlyne 1970). According to this model, the effect of repetition is determined by two opposing psychological factors: positive habituation and tedium. As the number of exposures increases, the domination of the first factor declines and that of the second factor increases, causing the deterioration of the ad's persuasive power. Further, Belch and Belch (1984) demonstrated in a later study that unaided recall and intention to use Federal Express, designed as a measure of persuasion, did not reveal any significant effect of humor, number of exposures, and the interactions between the two. These results however are contradicted by another study (Gelb and Zinkhan 1985) which found that humor can be used to improve commercial effectiveness and that perceived humor significantly declines as the number of repetitions increases.

H3: Multiple exposures of the same humorous ads to the audience diminish the perceived humor of ads, and ultimately the advertising effectiveness.

The Influence of Social Settings

A second mitigating factor of humor effect is social setting. --Humor and the intimately related result it elicits, laughter, have long been considered to be a social phenomenon. They are expected to occur within patterns of social interactions, and are regulated by society in much the same way as other social-physiological reactions such as yawning (Coser 1959). Humor and laughter are often shared, and they are defined as part of the interactive process of social life. In this regard, laughter is often thought to be contagious; but most humor-related consumer behavior studies have ignored this social dimension to humor.

Repetition causes wear-out of humor. The wear-out of humor refers to the phenomenon that humorous ads lose their humor after a number of reruns. It indeed may cause adverse responses, such as irritation, on the part of the viewer or listener. According to a proposed theory, this wear-out effect can be mitigated by social setting. Zinkhan and Gelb (1990) argue that humor has a social dimension and that if the audience listening to or watching a commercial consists of more than one person, then the social setting dimension increases the likelihood that a message will be perceived as humorous, even after repetition. Their proposition is based on the findings of several studies in this area (see Butcher and Whissell 1984; Aiello et al. 1983; Brown et al. 1982).

H4: Increased size of audience positively influences the degree of perceived humor

Intervenient Variables:

Frequency of the Ads

Gender and Size of the Audience

Prior Exposure

Independent variable

Perceived Humour

Dependant variable

Attitude towards the Humorous Ad

Attention

Message Recall

Likability

Gender of the Audience

Perceived Humour

Attitude towards the Humorous Ads

Advertising Effectiveness

Size of Audience

Message Recall

Independent Variable Intervenient variables Dependant variable