H - Taboo Advertising - Sabri - Fragen

Question 1

What is a taboo? What is taboo advertising? Name some examples of taboo advertising (either cited from the article or other examples you know). Develop some own creative ideas of taboo advertising.

Answer 1

Taboo:
- A social and cultural production that enacts normative prohibitions within a group that cannot be violated.

Taboo advertising:
- Advertisers transgress taboos to attract consumers attention and to promote brand recall

Most frequently used:
- death and sexuality

Example:
- Mosquito committing suicide, ad for an insect spray

Question 2

Which theory helps explaining the relationship between taboo and attention? What is the „taboo-superiority effect“? How does Sabri criticize prior research on the taboo-superiority effect? Why does the author expect that the relationship between taboo and advertising effectiveness might be curvilinear?

Answer 2

Arousal theory:

• posits a direct relationship between emotionally arousing stimuli and attention
• taboo advertisements are intended to arouse emotions reflecting the emotionally charged stimuli, they can be presumed to attract a higher level of audience attention compared to those based on non arousing or neutral stimuli

taboo-superiority effect:

• an individual exposed to a list of taboo words is expected to exhibit a stronger galvaric skin response than that resulting from exposure to neutral stimuli
• taboo words generated heightened attention

Criticism:
- the researchers only used medium level of tabooness words

Curvilinear relationship:

• low level tabooness: not enough impact to attract attention
• moderate level tabooness: intriguing, diverting attention, stimulating processing of the content
• high level: revulsion, attention is diverted, processing stops

Question 3

Describe the experimental design. How many factors are used? Is it within or between-design? Were subjects assigned randomly to the treatment groups? What is the advantage of randomization?

Answer 3

• multifactorial/multivariate, 2 factors
• between subjects
• randomly assigned to one of the six groups

Advantage of randomization:
- no biases because of certain formation of groups

-> general advantage of randomization (Lecture G)
- people with different backgrounds
- differences assigned randomly so they will be more or less equalized

Question 4

How was the level of tabooness manipulated? How did Sabri develop these manipulations? Did the manipulations work as expected?

Answer 4

Manipulation:

• digitally altering a real print advertisement
• progressively increasing the sexual explicitness

Development:
- pretest and manipulation check during the experiment

Worked as expected?
- yes, the validity of three levels of tabooness was confirmed

Question 5

Describe Sabri’s hypotheses about the effects of tabooness on (1) attention, (2) memory, and (3) attitude towards the advertisement. Are the hypotheses supported by the empirical study?

Answer 5

Hypothesis 1:
- the relationship between tabooness and attention is curvilinear
- means that attention is highest, when taboo level is moderate
(based on taboo superiority effect)

Hypothesis 2:

• the relationship between level of tabooness and recall has an inverted u-shape/is curvilinear
• recall is highest, when level of tabooness is moderate

Hypothesis 3:

• the relationship between level of tabooness and attitude towards the advertisement is negative linear
• was supported

Question 6

How was humor manipulated? How did Sabri develop these manipulations? Did the manipulations work as expected?

Answer 6

How manipulated?:
- they added a tag line to the advert

Development:

• table 1
• Two stages first five women between 18 55 years took part in brainstorming
• 20 females were shown 3 adverts with three alternative tag lines, decided which one was the most amusing one

Did it work?:

• yes it worked about
• Ran a t test and found that the tag line was perceived more humorous
• Level of humour was very Low in both cases

Question 7

Why do advertisers increasingly combine taboo advertisings with humor? Which role is humor expected to play in taboo ads?

Answer 7

Why combination?:
- the effect of humor can help to reduce complaints that images and messages are offensive by lowering the received degree of taboo violation

Role of humor:

• humor is often used to broach sensitive and taboo issues
• humor has the potential psychotherapeutic benefit of „systematic desensitization“, which reduces fear of an object or of dealing with a sensitive topic

Question 8

According to the empirical findings, how does humor affect the perceived level of tabooness? Describe the effect on (a) attention, (b) recall, (c) attitude towards the ad. Is the effect additional to the taboo effect or is there an interaction?

Answer 8

How affects humor tabooness?:
- interaction was not significant, humour reduced the perception of tabooness only when level of tabooness was high

Hypothesis 5:
a) attention to humourous treatment was significantly higher when level of tabooness was high

-> partly supported

b) only significant when taboo level is low

- > partly supported

c) Attitude is significantly more positive when there’s humour when level of taboo is high, but not for low or medium taboo level

-> partly supported

Interaction:
tested for interaction effects, but didn’t find any

Question 9

Did the author include any control variables? If so, which statistical method did she use? How do the control variable influence the results?

Answer 9

Control variables:
- yes, Engagement with the press article & involvement with respect to the product category & general attitude to advertising & perceived congruence between advert and the product

Statistical method:
- two factor anova and regression

Influence of control variables:

• perceived congruence has a positive on attention
• None of the control variables had a significant effect on recall
• Perceived congruence between ad and product had a positive effect on attitude

Question 10

Explain the concepts of internal, external, and ecological validity in experimental design designs. Evaluate the internal, external and ecological validity of Sabris experiment.

Answer 10

Internal validity:
- validity of the causal inferences (IV -> DV)

External validity:
- validity of inferences to real-world settings

Ecological validity:
- validity of inferences to other persons, places, times, situations (Generalizability)

Internal validity:
- good because only females and controlled for age and profession, groups are comparable, standardisation more or less done, always the same setting, only tabooness changed, only humour changed

External validity:
- limitations because there were only french women

(vertauscht?) Ecological validity:
- placed the ad In a magazine so better than laboratory, maybe not real world setting because it was only in one magazine

Question 11

What are the advantages and disadvantages of a field experiment compared to a laboratory experiment? Did Sabri run a laboratory experiment? Create a design of field experiment that analyzes the effects of taboo advertising?

Answer 11

Field experiments near to reality, many variables that you can’t control

Yes, they had a sample of females that were chosen, got instructions, not done in a natural setting,
Creating a poster, place it in the city and ask people a few hundred meters after they passed by
Including different levels

Play an ad before a movie in a cinema, after the film: ask people about that ad