Influence of media context on humorous advertising effectiveness

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of three dimensions of media context – program type, break type, and pod position – on two types of humorous advertisements: incongruity resolution (IR) and arousal safety (AS). The study aims to demonstrate that different humor types are evaluated differently under similar media context elements and a particular humorous advertisement can be evaluated differently under different elements of media context.

The hypotheses were tested through two experiments which were planned and conducted as “between-subjects” design. The analysis of collected data were done through ANOVA using IBM SPSS 22.

The results indicated that the adverse impact of negative mood (vs positive mood) was greater on IR advertisements as compared to AS advertisements. Similarly, the negative impact of an abrupt break (vs smooth break) was greater on IR advertisements. However, both humor types were effective when placed in positive mood programs and smooth breaks.

The findings suggest that campaign and media planners need to consider the media context as well as humor types to get better return on their adspend. Results of this study can also be applicable for online medium.

This is the first study to test the impact of three dimensions of media context on two types of humorous advertisements.