15.43 Interpret the results.
Refer to Exercises 15.39 and 15.40. The subjects were 94 adult staff members at a West Coast university. They were evenly split into familiar and unfamiliar groups. Each subject watched a half-hour local news show from a different state that included ads at all the repetition levels. The selected ads were judged to be “good” by some experts and had been shown in regions other than where the study was conducted. The real names of the products were replaced by either familiar or unfamiliar brand names by a professional video editor. The ads were pretested, and no one in the pretest sample suggested that the ads were not real. Discuss each of these facts in terms of how you would interpret the results of this study.
15.43
Because the experiment was performed at a West Coast university, it does limit somewhat how much generalizing we can do as there could be aspects of West Coast students that make them more or less willing to accept familiar or unfamiliar brands. Putting the ads into a news program was extremely good because it doesn’t place the focus on the ads themselves, which could eliminate some biases. The facts about the ads being judged to be “good” and edited by professionals is good and makes our results more likely to apply in other professional settings, especially as they were also pretested and thought to be real. Overall, the experiment was set up quite well, though it might be good to test the ads in other regions.