The Effects of Media Context Experiences on Advertising Effectiveness

This study presents a quantitative examination of the qualitative impact of magazines on advertising effectiveness. The research identifies 39 distinct experiences involved in reading magazines. We propose that these experiences are a way of describing the media context for ads that appear in magazines. We show that the large majority of these experiences are related to advertising effectiveness. The more readers experience a magazine as "making them smarter," for instance, the more effective an ad in the magazine is. A context-free control group is included in the analysis. Heterogeneity across magazines is also examined, and it is further shown that these effects hold over the 100 largest magazines in the United States.