Zipped Commercials, Zapped Memory? Not Necessarily

As digital-video-recorders (DVRs) become more popular, an increasing number of television commercials are being zipped (fast-forwarded).  This paper examines how memory for brand names, products and attitudes toward commercials are influenced by zipping at the speeds used by the popular DVR manufacturer, TiVo (300, 1800 and 6000 percent).  Experimental results show that compared to ads shown in real-time, memory for the advertised brand names improves when the commercials are zipped at 300 percent of normal speed.  However, brand name recall dramatically declines as the commercials are zipped at faster speeds (1800 and 6000 percent).  Speed of zipping had a significant effect on the ability to recall the advertised brand for all commercials except those at the end of a commercial pod.  This suggests that all else being equal, ads placed at the end of a commercial pod are more likely to be recalled at all zipping speeds.  Viewers of zipped commercials had more neutral attitudes toward the ads compared with those who saw them in real-time.

[1]  H. Intraub.  The role of implicit naming in pictorial encoding. , 1979 .

[2]  Brian Sternthal,et al.  Examining the Vividness Controversy: An Availability-Valence Interpretation , 1986 .

[3]  B. Sternthal,et al.  Detecting and Explaining Vividness Effects in Attitudinal Judgments , 1984 .

[4]  Esther Thorson,et al.  Viewer Recall of Television Commercials: Prediction from the Propositional Structure of Commercial Scripts , 1984 .

[5]  John J. Cronin,et al.  In-Home Observations of Commercial Zapping Behavior , 1995 .

[6]  D. Berlyne.  Novelty, complexity, and hedonic value , 1970 .

[7]  A. Paivio.  Mental imagery in associative learning and memory , 1969 .

[8]  S. M. Leong,et al.  When Silence Is Golden: Effects of Silence on Consumer Ad Response , 1999 .

[9]  H. Intraub,et al.  Presentation rate and the representation of briefly glimpsed pictures in memory. , 1980, Journal of experimental psychology. Human learning and memory.

[10]  N. Ambady,et al.  Half a minute: Predicting teacher evaluations from thin slices of nonverbal behavior and physical attractiveness. , 1993 .

[11]  M. Potter,et al.  Recognition memory for a rapid sequence of pictures. , 1969, Journal of experimental psychology.

[12]  J. Cacioppo,et al.  Effects of message repetition and position on cognitive response, recall, and persuasion. , 1979 .

[13]  Kathy A. Lutz,et al.  Imagery-Eliciting Strategies: Review and Implications of Research , 1978 .

[14]  Tammo H. A. Bijmolt,et al.  Consumer Memory for Television Advertising: A Field Study of Duration, Serial Position, and Competition Effects , 1997 .

[15]  P. Stout,et al.  Zipped Commercials: Are They Effective? , 1989 .

[16]  James Maclachlan,et al.  Time-Compressed Speech in Radio Advertising , 1979 .

[17]  Gitte Lindgaard,et al.  Attention web designers: You have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression! , 2006, Behav. Inf. Technol..