Intense war news reduces ability to remember ads

Published: Thursday, March 4, 2010 - 11:50 in Psychology & Sociology
A new study shows that the more graphic and intense war news is, the less likely that viewers – regardless of political beliefs – will remember the advertising that follows the news. However, the researchers did find that lower-intensity programming resulted in a better recall of the advertising by proponents of the war.

The research, featured in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising, was conducted by Keven Malkewitz, assistant professor of marketing at Oregon State University, and Damon Aiken of Eastern Washington University. It is the first study of its kind related to programming intensity in the context of war news.

They surveyed 396 college students in three universities. They were shown five minutes of war programming (specifically war footage in Iraq), followed by two 30-second commercials, and then showed another five minutes of war news and more commercials. All the commercials had been aired during the nightly national news and featured common, name-brand products.

"There has been a great deal of research done in the area of what advertisers call 'intensity programming,'" Malkewitz said. "So the expectation was that viewers wouldn't recall any of the advertisements if it involved any war coverage, but that hadn't been studied before. The assumptions were only partly correct."

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