Ad Type and Presentation Mode Effects on Logo Recall

Introduction

The advertising and marketing sectors have seen the adoption of novel tools — including cell phones, computer networks, the internet, and digital games — in the modern era. The effects of these tools, along with the explosion of broadcasting stations, have led to intense rivalry within the current advertising industry. Diverse broadcasting networks must also contend with the obsolescence of conventional advertising methods due to the fragmentation of consumers, market overload, and reduced consumer attention. This has forced the broadcasting industry and its stakeholders to devise methods geared toward product familiarization through various presentation media that encourage brand awareness, as well as memory recall techniques to facilitate creativity in product delivery. Without a doubt, the marketing sector has continually endeavored to minimize consumer inattention (Arrazola, de Hevia, and Reinares, 2016).

It is therefore important for advertising professionals to estimate how effective their marketing methods and presentation instruments are. Research indicates that visual memory in human beings is remarkably strong: recollections are stored discretely and protected from interference, even when large numbers of observed images are encountered. Prevailing studies have also revealed enormous capacity in the visual domain during continuous memory tasks, with participants able to recognize more than 2,000 images and identify changes in category, orientation, and surface detail among objects (Blake, Nazarian, and Castel, 2015).

Advertising practitioners and academics have noted, however, that viewer attention is a scarce and unpredictable resource. The emergence of public networks and communication platforms has intensified this complexity. In the current environment, viewers routinely engage in multiple activities simultaneously — for example, watching television while responding to text messages — driving distraction to an all-time high. These media-multitasking consumers have demonstrated a tendency to perform poorly on memory tests, particularly those involving advertising recognition and recall (Angell, Gorton, Sauer, Bottomley, and White, 2016). Attention is therefore a limited resource, and its division among multiple advertising formats and presentation modes raises a key question: What effect does advertisement type and mode of presentation have on viewers' ability to recall?

The purpose of this study is to assess the effects of advertisement type and mode of presentation on viewers' recall ability. The researchers will examine how everyday attention to selected logos can be potentially facilitated by the method of presentation and affected by the type of company the logo represents. The dependent variable of this study is participants' ability to recall company logos. The independent variables are Type of Company Logo and Mode of Presentation.

The proposed study is somewhat similar to "The Apple of the Mind's Eye: Everyday Attention, Metamemory, and Reconstructive Memory for the Apple Logo," carried out by Blake et al. (2015), as both studies test recall of common, everyday logos by asking participants to draw a logo from memory. The key difference is that the researchers in the seed article did not implement any experimental manipulation to assess what could potentially affect recall of the Apple logo. In the present study, advertisement type and mode of presentation serve as stimuli to examine their impact on everyday recall.