تعامل رسانه و تبلیغات : حمل و نقل، تطبیق، انتقال و نفوذ

Three studies show that consumer response to advertising depends on engagement with the media content, in this case a television program, in which the advertising appears. The specific form of engagement studied is the experience of narrative transportation, of being absorbed into the narrative world of the program. If an ad is not intrusive, by virtue of where it occurs in a narrative, high transportation is shown to positively impact an ad. This impact is obtained if the ad matches the narrative (thematically compatible), supporting the hypothesis that transportation can act as a message frame that increases processing. If a compatible ad is intrusive, however, it is shown that high transportation is disrupted and this negatively impacts an ad. A third study proposes and finds an additional mechanism, called transportation transference, in which high narrative transportation increases the transportation with an ad that is not intrusive and this increase in ad transportation in turn increases advertising effectiveness.

One way to look at the effects of the narrative transportation experience on an ad is to view the narrative as a message frame. There is evidence that a message frame can lead to greater processing of a message. The arguments in the message receive greater scrutiny and elaboration and this yields more persuasion, assuming the arguments are strong. This is also consistent with other work showing that visual and verbal information in a story affects people's reasoning outside of the story per se (Bagozzi, 2008, Wyer and Adaval, 2004, Wyer et al., 2008 and Wyer et al., 2008). And engagement with fictional stories may even increase people's receptivity to persuasion (Green, Garst, & Brock, 2004). Two interrelated hypotheses arise from this view. The impact of framing on subsequent message processing depends on the extent to which the framing narrative is perceived as connected to the message. We hypothesize that if an ad does not disrupt (disrupts) narrative transportation the ad will not (will) standout as disconnected from the narrative and hence receive greater (less) processing. This is consistent with the results of Wang and Calder (2006). Using the message framing approach, however, it is possible to make a further prediction. It has been shown that when the message frame and the message content match or are compatible, the processing of the message and hence persuasion is further enhanced (Agrawal et al., 2007, DeSteno et al., 2004, Petty and Wegener, 1998 and Wang and Lee, 2006). Thus a second, related and twofold prediction concerns matching between the media narrative and the ad. In the studies that follow matching will be operationalized in terms of whether the narrative (program) and the ad share compatible thematic content.

Using a different media program and a different ad, we show again that high transportation can increase the impact of a non-intrusive ad and that it can increase the transportation with the ad itself, consistent with the transportation transference hypothesis. Participants reacted more favorably to a non-intrusive compatible ad placed at the change of scenes when they were more transported into the media program than when they were not. When the same compatible ad appeared in the climax of a scene and intruded on the media transportation experience, highly transported participants reacted more negatively to the ad. Response to the ad was measured in terms of ad attitude, indicating that our results are not limited to product attitude. The mediation analysis showed direct support to our hypothesis of transportation transference. Narrative transportation increases transportation with the ad and consequently ad effectiveness. That the effect of narrative transportation on ad effectiveness was entirely mediated by ad transportation in this study is evidence that transportation transference can be an important mechanism. Future research might in some cases find only a partial mediation, consistent with our discussion of transportation message framing and matching leading to greater processing. The use of a control group in this study provides us with a baseline condition. Interestingly, when participants evaluated the ad in isolation, their responses were as favorable as the most favorable among the experimental conditions. This suggests that viewed by itself the ad in this study was attended to and processed more fully. No doubt the ad received less attention and less processing in the media context of our experimental conditions. So the present results indicate that transportation can bring the impact of an ad up to the level of impact it has when consumers are attending only to it. But the results also indicate that inserting an ad into a transporting media program can sometimes backfire.