EFFECTIVENESS OF ADVERTISING CLUTTER: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Abstract

The advertising world has witnessed a constant upsurge in the advertising revenue and volume over last few decades. With the concept of globalization having caught pace in the era post 1991, and the changed market scenario, India too has witnessed a similar boom in the print, TV and web advertisement volume. This has resulted in problems like heavy advertising clutter in all the mediums, which has accompanied falling credibility and dipping effectiveness of advertisements. The advertising agencies, advertisers and media, all three have been on a spending spree to come out with a formula which can help them in deciding how they can have higher recall of ads and subsequently more effective ads even amidst such heavy clutter. Tom Brown and Michael Rothschild, two senior academicians and scholars, have found through a study that while the effectiveness of ads go down because of the clutter (as deduced by the aided recall method), unaided recall tests show even more depressing results. They also speculated that the effects of clutter on such recall may be near its maximum. Research also shows that clutter doesn't affect all the advertisements uniformly. Hence this research article focuses on measuring the effectiveness of ads amongst heavy advertising clutter. The objective will be to find out the degree of recall and to establish its relationship with the nature of advertisement, size of the advertisement, creative execution, and the appeal used, placement of the advertisement, and the color and layout used in the advertisement. For the purpose of the study, only newspaper advertisement will be considered. The researcher has used survey method, focus group recall test.