Consumer Responses to Advertising:

The Effects of Ad Content, Emotions, and

Attitude toward the Ad on Viewing Time
THOMAS J. OLNEY
MORRIS B. HOLBROOK
RAJEEV BATRA*

This study develops and tests a hierarchical model of advertising effects on viewing
time. The ads studied represent a sample of commercials aired during prime-time
broadcasts, and the effects are analyzed across the ads rather than across people.
Primary emphasis is placed on the attempt to explain a simulated behavioral measure
of attention to television commercials-that of channel switching (zapping) and fast-
forwarding through ads on prerecorded programs (zipping). In addition, the study
demonstrates a chain of effects from the content of television ads, through emotional
reactions and attitude toward the ad, to actual viewing behaviors.

P revious research on consumers' responses to ad-

vertising has begun to establish a hierarchical
model of advertising effects (for reviews, see Holbrook
[1986] and Preston [1982]). Measures of advertising
effects have thus far spanned all levels in the hierarchy,
moving backward from behavior (sales) to affect (at-
titude toward the brand or ad) to cognition (beliefs,
evaluative judgments) to attention or exposure (read-
ership or viewership). All of these are important to
the attainment of advertising objectives. However,
emerging technological developments have lately given
consumer researchers reason to put renewed emphasis
on the nature and antecedents of the attention and
exposure variables that form the very first step in the
hierarchy.
Specifically, the development of remote control de-
vices and VCRs has led to two practices that have dra-
matically altered the relationship between television
viewing and advertising exposure or attention-
namely, zipping and zapping. Some confusion has ex-
isted in the popular press over these terms. In our
usage, zipping refers to fast-forwarding through ads
previously recorded along with program material on
*T. J. Olney is assistant professor, Western Washington Univer-
sity, Bellingham, WA 98225. Morris B. Holbrook is the Dillard
Professor of Business, Graduate School of Business, Columbia Uni-
versity, New York, NY 10027. Rajeev Batra is associate professor,
School of Business Administration, University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor, MI 48109. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support
of the Columbia Business School's Faculty Research Fund and the
Faculty Development Fund of Western Washington University'S
College of Business and Economics.
440
a video cassette. By contrast, zapping occurs during
the broadcast itself and refers to the switching of the
channel when a commercial appears. In either situa-
tion, exposure and attention are radically different
from the comparatively passive nature of the old days
when, stereotypically, viewers sat in front of their tele-
visions and watched whatever paraded before their
eyes. While nonviewing behaviors such as talking,
reading, or leaving the room did exist even then (An-
derson 1985), zipping and zapping have greatly am-
plified the extent to which advertising viewing can be,
and is, avoided. Indeed, studies in both the United
States (Heeter and Greenberg 1985; IRI Information
Resources 1983, 1985; Kaplan 1985) and Great Britain
(Yorke and Kitchen 1985) have shown the pervasive-
ness of both phenomena.
THE STUDY
Given this recent development, the present study
uses a representative sample of television commercials
to examine the advertising-related antecedents of
viewing time. Specifically, the study proposes a be-
havioral measure of consumers' viewing responses to
television commercials based on a simulation of zip-
ping and zapping as indicants of attention to the ad.
The antecedents of the measure that it investigated are
a multicomponent representation of attitude toward
the ad, two dimensions of emotional responses, and
various aspects of advertising content. In particular,
the study focuses on the variance in viewing time ex-
plained by three attitudinal components (hedonism,
utilitarianism, and interestingness), by two emotional
© 1991 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc .• Vol. 17 • March 1991
All rights reserved. 0093-5301/91/1704-0007$02.00
EFFECTS ON VIEWING TIME
FIGURE 1
HIERARCHICAL MODEL OF ADVERTISING EFFECTS
f- Ad content
-
(Appeals) Emotional
dimensions
(Pleasure
Ad content and
'-- (Uniqueness) Arousal)
I
dimensions (pleasure and arousal), and by the unique-
ness of ad content (versus a more standard set of ad-
vertising appeals). Additionally, the study examines
the mediating roles of intervening variables along a
hierarchical chain of effects in which advertising con-
tent influences emotions and attitude toward the ad,
which, in turn, influence viewing time.
The Model
Our tentative model for the hierarchical chain that
culminates in viewing time appears in Figure 1. As
shown by the diagram, we assume a forward recursive
flow of effects from ad content through emotions and
attitudinal responses to viewing behavior. Working
backward, we assume that viewing time depends di-
rectly on three components of attitude toward the ad-
namely, hedonism, utilitarianism, and interestingness.
These three influences on viewing time depend, in
turn, on emotional responses to the ad (we focus pri-
marily on the emotional dimensions of pleasure and
arousal). Finally, we assume that these emotional re-
sponses reflect advertising content (with respect to both
the ad appeals used and the uniqueness of the ad).
In general, then, we view emotional responses and
the three attitudinal components as intervening vari-
ables that mediate the relationship between ad content
and viewing time. The question marks in the diagram
indicate the issue of whether a variable exerts a direct
effect beyond its indirect effect via mediation.
General Analytic Approach
Our model of hierarchical effects raises a number of
issues that require empirical investigation. To that end,
the present study follows a procedure developed by
(among others) Holbrook and Batra (1987) in a dif-
ferent context. Specifically, as applied here, this ap-
proach
1. traces a hierarchical chain of effects from ad content
through emotional responses and attitude toward the
ad to viewing time (the criterion variable),
441
? ?
Attitudinal Viewing
components Time
(Hedonism, f----+ (zipping and
Ut il ita ri an ism, zapping)
Interestingness)
?
2. follows a practice common in advertising research
by treating the ad itself as the unit of analysis and
examining relationships across ads at the aggregate
level,
3. guards against method artifacts by using separate
samples of judges to provide independently obtained
measures of the variables at each stage of the model,
4. views these separate samples of judges as providing
content analyses and related response measures for
the television commercials of interest,
5. tests for mediating effects via the rule that Y mediates
the effect of X on Z if and only if (1) X is related to
Z, (2) Y is related to Z, (3) X is related to Y, and (4)
when Z is regressed on X and Y is controlled for, the
significance of X in explaining Z decreases (partial
mediation) or disappears entirely (complete media-
tion; see Baron and Kenny 1986).
Key Variables
Viewing Time (Zipping and Zapping). As dis-
cussed earlier, zapping is the act of using a remote
control device to change the channel when a com-
mercial comes on. By contrast, zipping refers only to
prerecorded programs on video and occurs when the
viewer uses the controls of a VCR to fast-forward
through commercials. While both zipping and zapping
have attracted much attention over the past few years,
neither has been thoroughly studied, in part because
both remain somewhat intractable in the practical
problems they present to the researcher.
In the absence of such research, doubt lingers re-
garding whether zipping and zapping behaviors are
simply different manifestations of the same phenom-
enon. Conceptually, since both represent different
ways of decreasing viewing time of commercials, one
would expect zipping and zapping to be strongly in-
terrelated. Indeed, theory drawn from psychology in
general (see, e.g., Kahneman 1973) and from consumer
behavior in particular (see, e.g., Bettman 1979) sug-
gests that both phenomena represent attention as
442
measured by viewing time. In general, the use oflook-
ing time to measure attention has a venerable history
in the psychological literature on exploratory behavior
(see, e.g., Berlyne 1960). In this tradition, looking time
has been related to the novelty of stimuli (Leckart
1966; Leckart and Bakan 1965, 1969) and to such other
collative properties as uncertainty and complexity
(Berlyne 1958, 1963). Looking time has also prompted
some applications in advertising research in which, for
example, greater visual complexity has been shown to
increase the length of time that subjects spend looking
at print ads presented with a slide projector (Morrison
and Dainoff 1972). Hence, we investigate whether zip-
ping and zapping appear to constitute cognate phe-
nomena. In sum, as indicated by the diagram shown
in Figure 1, the present study focuses on looking time
as the key outcome of a hierarchical model that, in the
spirit of Berlyne (1960), considers viewing behavior as
dependent on such antecedent variables as the effects
of advertising uniqueness, as mediated by emotional
arousal and attitudinal interest.
Attitude toward the Ad. A review of recent litera-
ture on attitude toward the ad indicates that there is
probably more to this variable than overall evaluation
as captured by a unidimensional global affect. For ex-
ample, several recent studies have used a four-item
index (good-bad, like-dislike, irritating-not irritating,
and uninteresting-interesting; Gardner 1985; Mitchell
1986b; Mitchell and Olson 1981), yet these four items
accounted for only 68 percent of the evaluative vari-
ance in the study in which they were first used (Mitchell
and Olson 1981). This suggests that attitude toward
the ad involves additional phenomena that might be
captured by other measures. Indeed, related work by
Batra and Ahtola (1991) supports the notion that at-
titude involves more than just an overall, unidimen-
sional evaluative measure of global affect. That study
found two dimensions of attitude-one labeled "he-
donic" and the other "utilitarian." Of these, the he-
donic dimension (corresponding to an evaluation of
pleasure) appears to resemble the "entertaining" di-
mension discussed in earlier copy-testing research by
Schlinger (1979), which rated the ad on being "plea-
surable," and the "humor" dimension of Wells, Leav-
itt, and McConville (1971), which rated the ad on its
"playfulness." The utilitarian attitude component,
conversely, evaluates the ad on how useful it is and
appears to correspond to Schlinger's "relevant news"
dimension ("useful") and to Wells et al.'s "personal
relevance" factor ("important to me, valuable").
Clearly, it is of interest to see if these two attitude
components have differential relationships to ad-
viewing time.
Further, the frequent use of interestingness as part
of a multi-item measure of global attitude toward the
ad (Gardner 1985; Lutz, MacKenzie, and Belch 1983;
MacKenzie, Lutz, and Belch 1986; Mitchell 1986b;
JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
Mitchell and Olson 1981) raises an issue that suggests
another potential research opportunity. Specifically,
research by Berlyne (1960) and his colleagues has con-
sistently found a nonmonotonic (inverted-U-shaped)
relation between interestingness and overall liking,
suggesting that interestingness should be kept separate
rather than combined into one global measure of
overall attitude toward the ad.
Previous empirical research on attitude toward the
ad has tended to focus primarily on establishing ad
attitude as of theoretical and practical importance in
mediating advertising effectiveness, without develop-
ing the nature ofthis construct more precisely. As two
exceptions, Burke and Edell (1986) investigated a di-
mensional representation of attitude toward the ad
based on a combination of 38 adjectives, while Mad-
den, Allen, and Twible (1988)-following Shimp
(1981)-pursued an attempt to decompose attitude
toward the ad into its cognitive and affective compo-
nents. Such empirical research is in keeping with the
theoretical framework developed by MacKenzie and
Lutz (1989), who suggest various antecedents of overall
attitude toward the ad. The present study, which looks
at specific components, builds on such efforts by ex-
amining a multidimensional structure of attitude to-
ward the ad based on three attitudinal components-
hedonism, utilitarianism, and interestingness-the
first two taken from Batra and Ahtola (1991), and the
third from Berlyne (1960).
Thus, in this conception, instead of evaluating ad
attitudes through overall items (such as good-bad, like-
dislike), we use items for each specific component: he-
donism (an evaluation along the entertainment di-
mension), utilitarianism (an evaluation of usefulness),
and interestingness (an evaluation of curiosity). Such
disaggregation will permit the study of the possibly
differing behavioral (viewing) effects of each of these
attitudinal components. Thus, in the hierarchical
model of advertising responses (Fig. 1), viewing time
depends on these three attitudinal components, which
depend, in turn, on emotions and advertising content.
Emotional Dimensions. Thanks to calls for ex-
amining the role of emotions and affect in advertising
(e.g., Batra and Ray 1986; Holbrook and O'Shaugh-
nessy 1984; Mitchell 1986a), abundant current re-
search indicates that we can view the place of emotion
in advertising from diverse perspectives. These include
the warmth focus of Aaker, Stayman, and Hagerty
(1986), the irritation concerns of Aaker and Bruzzone
(1985), the use of a large battery of subjective feelings
by Edell and Burke (1987), the Izard (1977) DES-II
emotional measurement instrument adopted by West-
brook (1987), and investigations into the interactions
between ads and their program context (Goldberg and
Gorn 1987). Aaker, Stayman, and Vezina (1988) pro-
vide an impressive inventory of feelings elicited by ad-
EFFECTS ON VIEWING TIME
vertising. Batra and Holbrook (1990) pursue similar
ends in creating an affective typology.
Thus, one finds a variety of competing perspectives
on the measurement of emotions in advertising from
which to choose. However, the emotional measure-
ment system that has probably received the greatest
attention from consumer researchers thus far is the
PAD scheme for assessing the emotional dimensions
of pleasure, arousal, and dominance (Mehrabian and
Russell 1974). The Mehrabian-Russell PAD dimen-
sions have been employed by such researchers as Christ
(1985), Christ and Biggers (1984), Donovan and Ros-
siter (1982), and Holbrook et al. (1984). Further, using
principal components analysis on a battery of emo-
tional items derived from many different sources,
Holbrook and Batra (1987) recovered these three
emotional dimensions of pleasure, arousal, and dom-
ination. Recently, Russell (1980; Russell, Weiss, and
Mendelsohn 1989) has suggested that the third dimen-
sion (dominance) can be dispensed with. Although this
remains an empirical question, in the present study,
we found no important effects of dominance. Hence,
we shall discuss only the roles of pleasure and arousal.
Specifically, as indicated by the hierarchical model
in Figure 1, we propose that pleasure and arousal
should intervene between ad content and attitude to-
ward the ad in explaining viewing time. Here, in par-
ticular, it makes sense to argue that interestingness
should reflect arousal, which should, in turn, depend
on the uniqueness of ad content (as discussed below).
Meanwhile, hedonism should depend on pleasure,
which should reach its peak at an intermediate level
of uniqueness (also discussed below).
Ad Content. The present study employs measures
of advertising appeals drawn from a variety of sources
(e.g., Holbrook and Batra 1987; Schlinger 1979; Stew-
art and Furse 1984; Wells 1964; Wells et al. 1971).
However, because of our focus on attention as mea-
sured by viewing time and on the relevance of the work
by Berlyne, we thought it appropriate to give special
emphasis to the aspects of advertising content related
to uniqueness.
Berlyne (1960) developed a set of variables that rep-
resent the amount of new information in a stimulus,
especially as it relates to previously encountered stim-
uli. These include such properties as novelty, surprise,
complexity, and uncertainty. Berlyne found a consis-
tent relationship between these properties and the
amount of attention paid to a stimulus. This relation-
ship has generally assumed the form of an inverted U,
with maximum attention paid to stimuli at interme-
diate levels of novelty, surprise, complexity, or uncer-
tainty. Hence, we would expect the same nonmono-
tonic relationship between viewing time for ads and
their levels of these properties in general. Additionally,
Berlyne's (1971) later work on aesthetics suggests that
these stimulus properties should also have a non-
443
monotonic effect on the emotional dimension of plea-
sure and the hedonism component of attitude toward
the ad.
Previous advertising research has examined the in-
formativeness of ads with respect to the usefulness of
that information (Marquez 1977; Pollay, Zaich-
kowsky, and Fryer 1980; Resnik and Stern 1977). De-
spite this literature, some doubt remains concerning
how one should assess new information (novelty) in
the present context. From one perspective, which we
shall call "uniqueness," novelty represents the degree
to which a particular ad differs from other exemplars;
this perspective is similar to that of Mandler (1982),
whose work suggests that we might view the novelty
of a television commercial as an incongruity between
a viewer's existing schema for television commercials
and the nature of the commercial in question. From
another perspective, which we might call "familiarity,"
novelty depends on an individual's (lack of) prior ex-
perience with a given ad or brand (cf. Baker et al. 1986).
From the Berlynian viewpoint, both seem relevant.
However, the nature of our design (which involved
assessing advertising content after the ads had already
appeared on television) impaired our ability to rely
confidently on the use of judges in content analysis to
measure the familiarity of the commercials. Hence,
we shall focus here on those results that bear on the
judges' assessments of advertising uniqueness (i.e., the
extent to which a commercial differs from other ad-
vertising).
Research Questions and Hypotheses
As its main thrust, this study attempts to develop a
model for the explanation of viewing time. Each set
of variables (ad content, emotional responses, attitude
toward the ad) was expected to influence viewing time
to some extent. In particular, we expected that viewing
time would respond to uniqueness according to the
aforementioned nonmonotonic function. Further, we
expected that this inverted-U-shaped relationship
would be fully or partially mediated by the positive
intervening effects of both the emotional dimensions
(pleasure and arousal) and two of the ad-attitude com-
ponents (hedonism and interestingness). We left the
directions of the effects of the specific ad-content fac-
tors and the possible role of utilitarianism as research
questions for exploratory investigation.
METHOD
The Unit of Analysis
The present study continues the tradition established
by advertising researchers such as Wells (1964), Wells
et al. (1971), Schlinger (1979), Holbrook and Lehmann
(1980), Stewart and Furse (19!55, 1986), Pechmann and
Stewart (1985), Holbrook and Batra (1987), and Thor-
son, Heide, and Page (1987), in which the ad itself is
 444
the unit of analysis, and the measurements of ad-re-
lated factors involve assessments made by samples of
judges who perform a role closely akin to that more
generally associated with content analysis (Holsti 1969;
Krippendorff 1980; Weber 1985). This use of content
analysis in a consumer-behavior context follows sug-
gestions made by Kassarjian (1977) and Holbrook
(1977) regarding the rich potential of the method for
researching the nature of consumer-directed com-
munications and their effects.
Notice that our approach departs somewhat from
the emphasis on objective assessment of message ele-
ments that is normally associated with content anal-
ysis, and this departure increases as we move from
analysis of ad content to measures of emotion and at-
titude (see Fig. 1). Specifically, our measures of ad
content (discussed later) are intended to provide rel-
atively objective assessments of the appeals and
uniqueness associated with the message. By contrast,
the emotional measures include a subjective aspect re-
lated to how the judge feels when watching the ad
(happy or unhappy, etc.). Finally, the attitudinal mea-
sures impose a layer of evaluative judgments on the
viewing experience (entertaining or not entertaining,
etc.). In these more subjective and evaluative types of
ratings, one hopes for intersubjective validity based
on consensus rather than any stricter type of objec-
tivity.
Notice also that this aspect of our method causes
certain closely related aspects of advertising content
and subjective responses to reappear under different
interpretations at succeeding stages of the hierarchical
chain. For example, as one aspect of ad content, an
"enjoyment" appeal was rated for each ad by the
judges. In reporting emotions, a separate set of judges
assessed how strongly the ad contributed to their plea-
sure on such items as "happy-sad." Still another set
of judges evaluated the ad on its degree of hedonism
with respect to such terms as "entertaining." Clearly,
one would expect those particular facets of the overall
hierarchical model to be related: enjoyment appeals
should enhance pleasure, which, in turn, should con-
tribute to hedonism. Indeed, the need to avoid shared-
methods variance attributable to lexical redundancy
among these and other subsets of items across types
of measures is the primary reason for collecting our
ratings of ads at the different stages of the model from
independent samples of judges (cf. MacKenzie et al.
1986).
Notice finally that in treating the ad (rather than the
respondent) as the unit of analysis, we run counter to
Edell and Burke's emphasis on the importance of an-
alyzing feelings across respondents (rather than across
ads). Specifically, Edell and Burke (1987, p. 430) argue
that "feelings appear to be properties of the individual"
and conclude that "feelings . . . may not be appro-
priate descriptors of ads." We agree completely that
people may differ in their emotional responses to an
JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
ad. However, we would amplify Edell and Burke's ar-
gument to suggest that feelings result from the inter-
action of people with ads. Though both sides of the
interaction are important, one can legitimately focus
on either side. Edell and Burke have chosen to examine
the psychological process at the individual level. For
some purposes, however, one may wish to focus on
the hierarchical effects of the ads themselves. For ex-
ample, getting favorable results in the marketplace may
depend on finding and manipulating emotional aspects
of advertising that are relatively homogeneous across
members of the audience (thereby obtaining high in-
tersubjective agreement). If the consumers in a target
segment all respond differently to the emotional con-
tent of a firm's ad, its effects on market behavior may
disappear. Hence, a focus on the ad as the unit of anal-
ysis remains relevant to those concerned with out-
comes in terms of advertising effectiveness and other
marketing-related variables.
The Sample
We created the sample of ads for the present study
by taping prime-time television in a northeastern city
on random nights for a week, numbering all the distinct
30-second commercials that appeared on the tapes, and
then randomly choosing a sample of 150 ads. Given
this procedure, our sample included commercials for
both national and regional goods and services. These
ads were then edited by a video production company
onto three different tapes (described later). However,
because of technical problems, four of the 150 were
lost, leaving 146 ads in the final sample.
This sample tends to represent what viewers actually
watch and, as such, departs from other research in
which the ads have reflected a particular range of emo-
tions or executions of special interest to the investi-
gators. Specifically, instead of choosing ads to cover
as wide a range of emotional responses as possible, our
study uses a sample representative of ads actually
broadcast to estimate the hierarchical model of ad-
vertising effects. This allows us to draw conclusions
about what ads actually do, whereas conclusions drawn
from carefully chosen samples of ads tell us more about
what ads can do (Douglas M. Stayman, conversation
with authors, 1986). Hence, in this sense, any findings
that emerge from the present study should represent
typical commercials, at least for prime-time television
during the late 1980s in the Northeast.
The Judges
For each level of the hierarchical model shown in
Figure 1, different judges responded to the ads on the
variables of interest. That is, separate samples of judges
evaluated the ads for the types of salient appeals,
uniqueness, the emotional response dimensions (plea-
sure and arousal), the components of attitude toward
EFFECTS ON VIEWING TIME
the ad (hedonism, utilitarianism, and interestingness),
and viewing behavior (zipping and zapping).
This approach assumes homogeneity among sepa-
rate samples of judges. To this end, all judges and be-
havioral viewers came from a pool of business students
with no more exposure to academic marketing than a
first course at the MBA level. Wherever possible, the
various judging tasks were assigned randomly. For
some of the measures, especially those involving
lengthy sets of ratings, judges received a token payment
for their participation. For other measures, especially
those based on zipping and zapping behavior, respon-
dents fulfilled a course requirement for the aforemen-
tioned first marketing course. Details on each mea-
surement and the relevant respondents follow.
The Measures
Viewing Time. Combining two behavioral assess-
ments from two separate conditions into one variable
(Viewing Time) provides our operationalization of the
theoretical construct of attention (our main criterion
variable as measured by looking behavior). Specifi-
cally, in this study, viewers recruited from the general
pool of MBA students and tested in private screenings
watched 75 minutes of ads in either a simulated zipping
or a simulated zapping condition. On each day of test-
ing, subjects all performed either the zipping or the
zapping simulation. Sets of subjects were randomly
assigned to the two conditions, so that 50 viewers saw
the ads in the zipping condition, and 52 in the zapping
condition.
In the zipping condition, the 146 ads appeared on
a tape in random order with the full sequence repeated
again after the last ad. The production company had
inserted a red and white sign saying "stop" between
each of the ads. Viewers were equipped with a remote
control device that allowed them to speed up or stop
the VCR. As the session began, the experimenter dem-
onstrated the operation of the VCR, which started at
random positions on the tape, and subjects watched a
sample series of ads. Then they were instructed to
watch the tape and to use the fast-forward or pause
button, however they chose, with the proviso that
whenever they saw a stop sign, they should momen-
tarily switch back to regular play if they were fast-
forwarding. Further, they were instructed to watch
the tape for a total of 75 minutes (the normal playing
time of the tape) and, if they reached the end of the
tape before this time, they were to rewind it and con-
tinue watching until the experimenter returned to
indicate the end of the session. Viewer behavior was
recorded by another VCR that taped everything tran-
spiring on the monitor as seen and controlled by the
viewer.
The zapping condition used two tapes with different
random orders of the ads, this time with no pauses
between commercials. Again viewers began at random
445
starting points on both tapes in the zapping simulation.
The two tapes were played on separate videocassette
recorders running simultaneously. Viewers controlled
which tape they watched by means of an AlB cable
push-button switch of the kind used for switching be-
tween two signals in multi-source installations.
Mounted on a stand, this switch permitted the viewer
to execute a clean zap from one channel to the other
and back. The initial starting position of the switch
was also randomized for each viewer. Viewers were
instructed to watch the ads and to use the switch as
they chose. Before the tapes began rolling, viewers were
asked to push the buttons once or twice to get a feel
for it. This demonstrated to them that they had a choice
of two channels to watch. As in the zipping condition,
another VCR recorded everything that actually ap-
peared on the screen as controlled by the viewer. Be-
cause of the randomization, it remained entirely pos-
sible for an individual never to see any given ad, clearly
a realistic aspect of the simulation. For both zipping
and zapping, data for Viewing Time was obtained by
using an ordinary stopwatch to record the amount of
time each ad appeared on each viewer's monitor tape
at normal speed.
Commercial Appeals. To understand the kinds of
appeals likely to demonstrate the greatest effect, we
culled 34 items from 66 items used in an earlier study
by Holbrook and Batra (1987). Specifically, 25 of these
items came directly from one of the three measurement
instruments in that study, and the remaining nine
items, which needed rewording, were taken from the
other two instruments. The resulting set of 34 appeals,
listed in Exhibit 1, was presented in random order,
and each item was rated within a seven-position range
from weak to strong.
Using this type of rating task as the basis for content
analysis precludes the need to provide judges with the
sorts of detailed coding instructions and category def-
initions normally associated with this procedure (as-
suming, of course, that satisfactory interjudge reli-
ability can be attained on the basis of the item names
themselves). Thus, 12 judges for content analysis were
paid simply to rate each ad from "weakly" to
"strongly" on its use of each appeal. Judges identified
and rated each ad on a sheet of paper while viewing
the zipping tape, which provided the stimuli for all the
judgment tasks. For the measures of ad appeals, judges
started at staggered points on the tape to minimize the
sequence effects inherent in taped stimuli. Completing
the judging task for ad appeals required about four
hours per judge. Content judges performed the rating
task individually in a room by themselves and re-
mained in the room the entire time except for short
breaks.
Uniqueness. A battery of 18 items represented the
novelty-related factors studied by Berlyne (1960).
However, because of the possible effects of elapsed time
446 JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH

EXHIBIT 1
ASSESSMENT ITEMS

Ad content Emotional dimensions of response

Ad appeals (rated from weak to strong over a seven-position Pleasure
range) Happy-unhappy
Convenience Pleased-annoyed
Artistic merit Satisfied-unsatisfied
Health and well-being Contented-melancholic
Beauty Hopeful-despairing
Fear Relaxed-bored
Superior design Arousal
Duty Stimulated-relaxed
Comfort Excited-calm
Rational appeal Frenzied-sluggish
Product features Jittery-dull
Guarantees Wide awake-sleepy
Price or value Aroused-unaroused
Spirituality Attitudinal components
Sex appeal Hedonism
Status Unpleasant-pleasant
Enjoyment Fun to watch-not fun to watch
Status Not entertaining-entertaining
Emotional appeal Enjoyable-not enjoyable
Slice of life Utilitarianism
Loyalty of existing customers Important-not important
Evaluation appeal Informative-uninformative
Self-esteem Helpful-not helpful
Efficiency and performance Useful-not useful
Competence enhancement Interestingness
Virtue Makes me curious-does not make me curious
Solution to a problem Not boring-boring
Company image, reputation Interesting-not interesting
Craftsmanship Keeps my attention-does not keep my attention
Safety
Sensory character (taste, smell)
Appetite appeal (hunger, desire)
Attributes, ingredients, components
Aesthetics
Quality
Factual information
Uniqueness (bipolar adjectives rated over a seven-position range)
Peculiar-ordinary
Just like any other ad-different from any other ad
Average-special
Weird-normal
Nothing special-outstanding

in our data collection methodology, as previously
mentioned, we felt that items intended to assess fa-
miliarity should not be used for the present study. We
therefore confined our attention to five pairs of bipolar
adjectives intended to represent uniqueness. As listed
in Exhibit 1, these were presented in random order
and with their directions randomized within a seven-
position check-mark format. A separate group of 12
paid judges rated the ads on the novelty-related items.
With fewer items for this set of measures, the time
required to complete the rating task was somewhat
less than that for the ad appeals-about three and a
half hours, including breaks.
Emotional Measures. Another independent group
of separate judges rated the ads on a set of 18 items
developed by Mehrabian and Russell (1974) to assess
emotional response. The six items used to assess the
emotional dimension of pleasure and the six assessing
arousal are listed in Exhibit 1. The remaining six items
represented dominance, but, as previously noted, these
showed no important effects and will not be pursued
further in the present discussion. All items were pre-
sented in random order with a seven-position rating
format.
Unpaid graduate students (from the same overall
pool as for the other measures) watched 30 ofthe com-
mercials and rated their feelings toward each. As with
other measures, to reduce the sequence effects inherent
in taped stimuli, judges began at random starting
points on the randomized zipping tape. Each ad re-
EFFECTS ON VIEWING TIME
cei ved 12-15 ratings for each of the two emotion in-
struments. Judges for these two sets of measures came
from an introductory MBA marketing class in which
the research participation satisfied a course require-
ment. They required 48-80 minutes to complete the
rating of 30 ads.
Attitudinal Components. Measures of the three se-
lected components of attitude toward the ad again em-
ployed 12 paid judges drawn from the same general
pool of students after it was verified that they had not
participated in any of the other judgment tasks. Judges
rated their attitudes toward the ad on separate four-
item indices of Hedonism, Utilitarianism, and Inter-
estingness on a check-mark bipolar format with seven
positions. The items, appearing in Exhibit 1, were ran-
domized in both order and direction. As before, judges
began at starting points systematically varied along the
randomized tape containing the ads to reduce sequence
effects. Judges watched each ad and then responded
to all attitudinal items for that ad before viewing the
next one on the tape. The total time required for each
judge to complete this measurement task was 2-3
hours.
Timing
Because of limitations in our available financial re-
sources, we could not collect all of the measures just
described simultaneously. We did manage to obtain
the zipping and zapping measures within a few weeks
of the time the commercials were taped from prime-
time television. However, there was a six-month delay
in obtaining the emotion measures, followed by a sim-
ilar delay in collecting the ad-attitude and ad-content
measures. As previously mentioned, possible distor-
tions due to this latter delay caused us to drop the
familiarity measures from the items intended to rep-
resent novelty and to focus instead on the measures
of uniqueness. It should be noted that, if anything, the
timing factors pertinent to our study should exert a
downward bias on our ability to find the hypothesized
relationships under investigation, since they would
weaken observed relationships. Hence, our approach
appears to be conservative in this respect.
Data Transformations
As previously described, judges provided the mea-
sures for nearly all the variables in the model, with the
major exception of the behavioral measures of the ul-
timate criterion variables, zipping and zapping. In the
case of the emotion measures, for which each ad was
judged by 12-15 judges, the ratings of the twelfth judge
and any beyond the twelfth were combined and av-
eraged to form a twelfth pseudojudge so as to attain
comparability for purposes of assessing reliabilities.
To enable an across-ads analysis, we first computed
mean values for each measured variable across judges
447
for each ad. This resulted in a final data set consisting
of 146 observations on each variable, one observation
per ad.
Assessment of Reliabilities
The nature of the measurement task required that
reliabilities be assessed on each of the separate items
and indices-specifically, for those involvinr the ap-
peals, uniqueness, emotional, and attitudinal items.
Coefficient alpha provided a suitable method for as-
sessing these reliabilities in all possible configurations:
for individual items across judges, for indices within
judges, for within-judge indices across all judges, and
for the aggregate index composed of the mean of all
judges on each item. (For brevity, not all of these re-
liabilities are reported in what follows; those not men-
tioned can be obtained by writing to the first author.)
Principal Component Scores
To remove multicollinearity from the subsequent
regressions, principal components analyses were per-
formed on the appropriate sets of content, emotional,
and attitudinal items. These created uncorrelated
standardized component scores for use as independent
variables.
To retain the a priori Uniqueness measures of in-
terest in the ad-content judgments while removing any
remaining correlations between the Uniqueness and
the ad-appeals measures, the effects of Uniqueness and
Uniqueness Squared were partialed out of the ad-ap-
peals scores before performing an analysis of principal
components on the latter variables. In other words,
each ad appeal was regressed on Uniqueness and
Uniqueness Squared, with analysis of principal com-
ponents performed on the residuals. This step removed
all multicollinearity from the ad-content measures and
yielded ad-content factors totally orthogonal to judg-
ments of the ad's uniqueness.
Model Testing
As the model proposed is fully recursive, OLS
regressions provided standardized beta weights and
appropriate tests of significance to answer the questions
raised earlier. In general, our procedure followed the
logic described regarding the nature of a mediating
effect (Baron and Kenny 1986). In particular, with
respect to the question of whether emotions and atti-
tudinal components play an intervening role in the
relationship between ad content and viewing time, full
or partial mediation can be inferred if and only if the
following conditions are met: (1) ad content explains
viewing time; (2) emotions and attitudinal components
together explain viewing time; (3) ad content explains
emotions; (4) ad content and emotions together ex-
plain attitudinal components; (5) the effect of ad con-
448
tent on viewing time declines (partial mediation) or
disappears (full mediation) when the effects of emo-
tions and attitudinal components are statistically con-
trolled for in explaining viewing time (via multiple
regression): ad content, emotions, and attitudinal
components together explain viewing time.
RESULTS
Reliabilities and Validities of the Measures
Viewing Time: The Zipping and Zapping Mea-
sures. As we expected, across the 146 ads, the view-
ing-time measures showed a high degree of intercor-
relation (r = .75). For this reason, we combined the
standardized values for these measures into a two-item
index of Viewing Time.
Advertising Content: Appeals and Uniqueness.
Alphas for single-item interjudge reliabilities on each
of the 34 ad-appeal items ranged from a high of .92
for the appetite appeal to a low of .31 for the evaluative
appeal, with a median of .76. The five items for
Uniqueness attained interjudge reliabilities ranging
from a low of .84 for "weird" to a high of .87 for "av-
erage," with a median of .86. A more important mea-
sure of reliability concerns that for the index formed
by summing the Uniqueness measures across all items
within each judge and then calculating the interjudge
reliability on that sum; the resulting coefficient alpha
for interjudge reliability was .89. Finally, the multi-
item reliability for across-judge averages is .97 for the
five Uniqueness items.
Advertising Content: Principal Components. For
the cleanest possible measure of Uniqueness, we per-
formed a principal components analysis on the five
Uniqueness measures. This process resulted in a first
factor explaining 88 percent of the variance. Stan-
dardized scores on this first principal component were
calculated and used as the measure of Uniqueness in
all further analyses.
As previously stated, the measures of ad appeals were
regressed on Uniqueness and Uniqueness Squared to
remove any correlations between the Uniqueness and
ad-appeals variables, with principal components anal-
ysis performed on the residuals. The pattern of eigen-
values suggested retaining either a four-factor solution
(which explained 62 percent of the variance) or a two-
factor solution (which explained 42 percent of the
variance). After varimax rotation, we found the latter,
more parsimonious solution to be more interpretable,
as the two factors clearly suggested the traditional dis-
tinction between "facts" (e.g., efficiency, convenience,
rational, and factual appeals) and "feelings" (e.g., aes-
thetic, artistic, emotional, and beauty appeals). And,
in subsequent regressions, the four factors explained
only marginally greater variance in viewing time than
did the two first factors alone. We therefore retained
JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
these two factors, hereafter called Facts and Feelings,
along with the aforementioned factor of Uniqueness
and Uniqueness Squared, as our measures of adver-
tising content.
Emotional Indices: Pleasure and Arousal. The
single-item interjudge reliabilities for the emotional
items ranged from .79 for "wide awake" to .53 for
"contented," with a median of .70. As one would ex-
pect, the multi-item reliabilities ofthe six-item indices
based on scores averaged across judges were higher,
.95 for Pleasure and .97 for Arousal. Our averaged
multi-item emotional indices, therefore, benefit from
the variance-reducing tendencies inherent in taking
averages of averages (a helpful feature of our design).
As a check on the dimensional structure of the emo-
tions, we performed a principal components analysis
on the across-judge means for the full set of items.
After a varimax rotation, the structure of the factor
loadings corroborated the anticipated pattern. Hence,
to take advantage of their freedom from intercorre-
lations, we computed the rotated component scores
for Pleasure and Arousal and used these uncorrelated
emotional dimensions for all subsequent analyses.
Attitude toward the Ad. For attitude toward the
ad, each item belonged to one of three a priori attitude
indices. The reliability for individual items, as mea-
sured by the interjudge coefficient alpha, ranged from
.87 for "the ad is entertaining" to .65 for "makes me
curious," with a median of .80. The multi-item reli-
abilities for the four-item indices averaged across
judges were .95, .90, and .94 for Hedonism, Utilitar-
ianism, and Interestingness, respectively.
As a check on the structure of our attitude toward
the ad indices, the 12 relevant mean across-judge items
were subjected to principal components analysis. The
first three components accounted for 91 percent of the
variance in these data and, after varimax rotation,
faithfully recreated the a priori indices of Hedonism,
Utilitarianism, and Interestingness. Accordingly, to
avoid multicollinearity among the attitudinal com-
ponents, we used scores on each factor in all subse-
quent analyses.
Research Questions and Hypotheses
Tables 1 and 2 indicate the beta coefficients and R 2 s
obtained when various combinations of the indepen-
dent variables are used to predict the dependent mea-
sures of interest.
Viewing Time. Table 1 presents the key regression
results for Viewing Time as the dependent variable.
Column 1 shows that Viewing Time depends strongly
on the ad-content variables. The expected nonmono-
tonic effects of Uniqueness are reflected in the signif-
icance of both terms, and there is an exploratory but
plausible positive effect of Feelings and a negative effect
of Facts. When considered in isolation (col. 2), the
EFFECTS ON VIEWING TIME 449

TABLE 1

HIERARCHICAL REGRESSION ANALYSIS OF CONTRIBUTIONS TO VIEWING TIME

(STANDARDIZED BETA WEIGHTS, R 2 s, AND HIERARCHICAL F TESTS)

Viewing time (dependent variable)

Independent variables 2 3 4 5

Ad content:
Facts -.11' -.14'
Feelings .34**** .22***
Uniqueness .67**** .24"
Uniqueness Squared -.24 **** -.15"
Emotions:
Pleasure .35**** .12+ .06 (NS)
Arousal .55 **** .19" .19"
Attitudinal components:
Hedonism .41···· .32**** .16"
Utilitarianism -.14" -.15" -.00 (NS)
Interestingness .64 **** .50**** .37****
R2 .54 **** .43**** .60**** .63**** .67****
Hierarchical F tests:"
Ad content 41.59···· 4.97'"
Emotions 53.01···· 4.67" 4.29'
Attitude components 71.02 •••• 24.81···· 6.79'"
Emotions and attitude components 10.95 ••••

a F is the test statistic indicating the significance of the incremental change in R2 that results from adding the designated set of variables to the equation.
+p<.10 .
• p < .05 .
•• p < .01 .
••• P < .001 .
•••• P < .0001.

emotional dimensions also predict Viewing Time, via
the expected positive contribution of both Pleasure and
Arousal. Viewing Time depends strongly on the atti-
tudinal components as well, reflected by highly sig-
nificant positive contributions from Hedonism and
Interestingness and by a significant negative contri-
bution from Utilitarianism (see col. 3).
Mediation. We next discuss how emotions and ad
attitudes intervene in the relationship between ad
content and Viewing Time. Here, we use the five con-
ditions needed to establish mediation (as previously
summarized). We have shown that Viewing Time de-
pends strongly on the ad-content variables (condition
1), and Table 1 shows that Viewing Time also depends
on the emotions and attitudinal components jointly
(condition 2). Columns 1 and 2 of Table 2 show that
ad content significantly influences Pleasure and
Arousal, thus satisfying condition 3; further, columns
9-11 of Table 2 show that ad content and the emotions
significantly explain Hedonism, Utilitarianism, and
Interestingness, so that condition 4 is also met. With
respect to condition 5, column 5 of Table 1 shows that
the effects of ad content on Viewing Time are reduced
in strength and significance (from F(4,141) = 41.59,
p < .0001, to F(4,136) = 4.97,p < .001) when emotions
and attitudinal components are added to the equation
predicting Viewing Time. Thus, emotions and atti-
tudinal components do appear to intervene between
ad content and Viewing Time. However, this media-
tion of the effects of ad content on Viewing Time is
only partial. Table 1 shows that Facts, Feelings,
Uniqueness, and Uniqueness Squared remain signifi-
cant (p < .05 or better) in predicting Viewing Time
when the emotions and attitudinal components are
controlled for, indicating that these aspects of ad con-
tent continue to exert direct effects beyond the me-
diating role of emotions and attitudinal components.
Relationships among Antecedent Variables. We
have noted that ad content influences Pleasure and
Arousal. Columns 6-8 of Table 2 further show that
the emotions, in turn, explain Hedonism (with the ex-
pected positive effect of Pleasure) and Interestingness
(with the expected positive effect of Arousal). By
themselves, the ad-content variables influence each of
these attitudinal components (see Table 2). These re-
lationships do not appear to be strongly mediated by
the emotions in that the contributions of ad content
decline only slightly or not at all when emotions are
added to the equation in columns 9-11 of Table 2.
Hence, significant direct effects-above and beyond
the mediating role of the emotions-continue to ap-
pear in the anticipated directions for the ad-content
variables in explaining the attitudinal components. In
particular, Feelings versus Facts work in opposite di-
rections to influence Hedonism and Utilitarianism,
450 JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH

TABLE 2

EMOTIONS AND ATTITUDINAL COMPONENTS AS FUNCTIONS OF AD CONTENT AND EMOTIONS

Dependent variables

Attitudinal components as a function Attitudinal components as a function Attitudinal components as a function

Emotions of ad content of emotions of ad content and emotions
Independent
variables Pleasure Arousal Hedonism Utilitariansim Interestingness Hedonism Utilitarianism Interestingness Hedonism Utilitarianism Interestingness

Ad content:
Facts .08 (NS) -.01 (NS) -.21** .42**** .15* -.25"'*** .40**** .15**
Feelings .22** .05 (NS) .28*"'*'" -.27**** .13* .17** -.34**** .12*
Uniqueness .39**** .49**** .43**** -.19** .66**** .26*** -.37**** .48****
Uniqueness-
squared -.43**** -.03 (NS) -.36**** -.31**** -.01 (NS) -.14* -.17** -.02 (NS)
Emotion:
Pleasure .63**** .22** .12+ .50**"'* .31***'* -.05 (NS)
Arousal .07 (NS) -.10 (NS) .63**** -.05 (NS) .12+ .40****
R2 .29**** .23**** .34**** .42**** .47**** .40**"'* .06** .41 **** .53**** .49**** .60****
Hierarchical
F tests:·
Ad
Content 14.37**** 10.69**** 18.52**** 25.83**** 31.06**** 9.44**** 29.56**** 15.78****
Emotions 48.36**** 4.55** 50.54**** 27.64**** 9.45**** 22.20****

• F is the test statistic indicating the significance of the incremental change in R2 that results from adding the designated set of variables to the equation.
+ p < .10.
* P < .05.
** P < .01.
*** P < .001.
**** P < .0001.

while Uniqueness plays a key direct role in influencing
Interestingness.
DISCUSSION
Limitations
Like other research on consumer behavior, the
present study illuminates the subject only within the
bounds of its own particular limitations. As with vir-
tually any investigation, the nature of the stimuli, re-
spondents, and instruments might have affected the
magnitudes or even the directions of the results re-
ported here. Hence, as always, the possibility exists
that different commercials, different judges, or differ-
ent measurement techniques could have resulted in
findings either more or less strong than those repre-
sented by the present data. For example, our measures
of ad content (appeals and uniqueness) offer just one
version of a general type of copy testing that has ap-
peared widely under diverse guises in the advertising
research literature cited earlier. Different schemes-
such as those presented by Wells, Leavitt, and Schlin-
ger-might have produced different results. Also, along
similar iines, we must emphasize that, at best, our
sample of 146 ads represents prime-time commercials
aired in the northeastern United States during the late
1980s. Further, we cannot be sure that ads scoring
higher or lower in Facts versus Feelings 'Hid not differ
in some other way (such as local vs. national origin or
high vs. low frequency of prior exposure). Replications
to assess these and other questions concerning internal
validity must await further research.
As another potential topic for further investigation,
one might wonder how our measures of zipping and
zapping would compare to those based on viewing
commercials naturalistically in the context of actual
televised program content. Only future research can
fully test the extent to which these potential threats to
external validity might have created or not created
problems for the generalizability of our results to other
situations relevant to the effectiveness of commercials
in broadcast television.
Conclusions
Subject to these limitations, we find the results of
this study encouraging. Because the tasks that respon-
dents completed to collect the measures of zipping and
zapping were fairly lengthy, we feared that any signal
contained therein might be swamped by fatigue effects
and other types of noise or error. However, inasmuch
as two measures collected separately in very different
circumstances yielded a fairly high correlation (r
= .75), our fears appear to have been exaggerated. This
establishes the convergent validity of the zipping and
zapping measures and the reliability of the viewing-
time index based on their combination. Support for
the nomological validity of this index appears in the
strong ability of the separately judged measures of ad
content, emotions, and attitude toward the ad to ex-
EFFECTS ON VIEWING TIME
plain convincingly the variance in Viewing Time in a
sound theoretical framework (overall R2 = .67).
It appears that advertising content does explain
Viewing Time (R 2 = .54) and that these effects are
partially mediated by the emotional dimensions and
the components of attitude toward the ad via two
primary "routes" to viewing time: (1) Feelings
and Uniqueness/Uniqueness Squared - Pleasure -
Hedonism - Viewing Time; (2) Uniqueness -
Arousal - Interestingness - Viewing Time. However,
beyond these mediating effects, there remains a sig-
nificant direct contribution of ad content to the ex-
planation of Viewing Time. This remaining direct ef-
fect comes, in part, from the hypothesized nonmon-
otonic influence of Uniqueness and Uniqueness
Squared, but it also depends on an exploratory finding
concerning the negative contribution of Facts and the
positive contribution of Feelings. Though not explic-
itly hypothesized and subject to the aforementioned
limitations concerning potential competing explana-
tions, it appears throughout our findings that ads ap-
pealing to feelings exert positive direct influences on
Pleasure, Hedonism, and Viewing Time, even when
other mediating variables are controlled for. This result
suggests that people attend selectively to positively va-
lenced messages that make them feel good. Meanwhile,
factual appeals contribute negatively to Hedonism, but
exert a direct positive effect on Utilitarianism and a
direct negative effect on Viewing Time-again, with
the appropriate controls for intervening variables.
These effects of Facts and Feelings-the apparent ten-
dency of Facts to discourage while Feelings entice
viewing behavior-clearly merit further investigation.
In further specific findings, our investigation of the
attitudinal components supports the notion of a
multidimensional construct in which Viewing Time
depends on such key influences as Hedonism, Utili-
tarianism, and Interestingness. As mentioned, prior
research on attitude toward the ad has tended to use
indices that aggregate over, and thus fail to detect, the
individually varying effects of these different compo-
nents. Only through dis aggregate analyses can we find
(as here) that Hedonism and Interestingness, but not
Utilitarianism, are the major influences on Viewing
Time.
Our study once again demonstrates the feasibility
of content analysis in studying communications phe-
nomena across objects (i.e., messages) to supplement
findings from analyses conducted across subjects (i.e.,
receivers). Based on common copy-testing applications
(Schlinger 1979; Wells 1964; Wells et al. 1971), this
approach has now achieved a relatively strong track
record in regard to print ads (Holbrook and Lehmann
1980), television commercials (Holbrook and Batra
1987; Pechmann and Stewart 1985; Stewart and Furse
1985, 1986), and consumption experiences (Havlena
1985; Havlena and Holbrook 1986). Keeping in mind
the aforementioned caveats by Edell and Burke (1987),
451
we believe the accumulated history of experience with
this approach suggests that it might prove useful in
other consumer-research contexts, such as those in-
volving brand choice, product usage, or the meanings
of possessions, especially if its results can be satisfac-
torily replicated in more conventional across-subjects
applications.
Finally, our analyses have added to the growing body
of knowledge about the hierarchical chain of effects
from advertising content through emotional responses
and ad attitude to actual viewing behavior. We found
that, for a reasonably representative set of commer-
cials, the emotional dimensions, attitudinal compo-
nents, and viewing behavior could be moderately well
explained by various aspects of advertising content.
In particular, in findings reminiscent of the aforemen-
tioned copy-testing literature, we have seen that the
uniqueness of ads can be meaningfully assessed by
content judges and that these ratings do, in fact, pro-
vide useful information for predicting emotional re-
sponses, attitude toward the ad, and viewing behavior.
That is, judged measures of Uniqueness significantly
explain additional variance in Mehrabian and Russell's
Pleasure and Arousal dimensions, in the attitudinal
components of Hedonism, Utilitarianism, and Inter-
estingness, and in Viewing Time. Further, where ex-
pected, Uniqueness demonstrated an inverted-U-
shaped relationship with the dependent variables of
interest, peaking well within the range of our data and
thereby replicating in a consumer-behavior context the
work of Berlyne and his colleagues, who have generally
focused on manipulating experimental stimuli in
carefully controlled laboratory settings rather than
measuring the novelty aspects of messages drawn from
the real world.
Summary
In sum, this study has developed and tested a hier-
archical model of advertising effects on viewing time.
It has placed primary emphasis on the attempt to ex-
plain a simulated behavioral measure of zipping and
zapping responses to television commercials. In ad-
dition, the study has demonstrated a chain of effects
from the content of television ads, through emotional
reactions and attitude toward the ad, to these actual
viewing behaviors.
[Received May 1989. Revised July 1990.]
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