a large scale research has been done by advertisers

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study or research?

• Thread starter Princess_Belle
• Start date May 10, 2015

Princess_Belle

• May 10, 2015

"A large-scale .......has been done by advertisers on the spending habits of today's teenagers" A. Research B. Study C. Question D. Search The key is B What is the difference between study and research?  

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Study is countable; research is uncountable.  

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Advertising Effectiveness by Jerry W. Thomas

The advertising industry, as a whole, has the poorest quality-assurance systems and turns out the most inconsistent product (their ads and commercials) of any industry in the world. This might seem like an overly harsh assessment, but it is based on testing thousands of ads over several decades.

Unlike most of the business world, which is governed by numerous feedback loops, the advertising industry receives little objective, reliable feedback on its advertising. First, few ads and commercials are ever tested among consumers (less than one percent, according to some estimates). So, no one—not agency or client—knows if the advertising is any good. If no one knows when a commercial is good or bad (and why), how can the next commercial be any better? Second, once the advertising goes on air, sales response (a potential feedback loop) is a notoriously poor indicator of advertising effectiveness because there is always so much “noise” in sales data such as competitive activity, out-of-stocks, weather, economic trends, promotional influences, pricing variation, etc. Third, some of the feedback on advertising is confusing and misleading: agency and client preferences and biases, the opinions of the client’s wife, feedback from dealers and franchisees, complaints from the lunatic fringe, and so on.

Barriers to Great Advertising

Advertising testing could provide a reliable feedback loop and lead to much better advertising, but many obstacles stand in the way. The first great barrier to better advertising is self-delusion. Most of us believe, in our heart of hearts, that we know what good advertising is and that there is no need for any kind of independent, objective evaluation. Agencies and clients alike often think that they know how to create and judge good advertising. Besides, once agencies and clients start to fall in love with the new creative, they quickly lose interest in any objective evaluation. No need for advertising testing. Case closed.

Strangely, after 40 years of testing advertising, we cannot tell you if a commercial is any good or not, just by viewing it. Sure, we have opinions, but they are almost always wrong. In our experience, advertising agencies and their clients are just as inept at judging advertising as we are. It seems that none of us is smart enough to see advertising through the eyes of the target audience, based purely on our own judgment.

A second barrier to better advertising is the belief that sales performance will reveal if the advertising is working. Unless the sales response to the advertising is immediate and overwhelming, it is almost impossible to use sales data to judge the effectiveness of the advertising. So many variables are beyond our control, as noted previously, that it’s impossible to isolate the effects of media advertising alone. Moreover, some advertising works in a few weeks, while other advertising might take many months to show positive effects, and this delayed response can confound our efforts to read the sales data. Also, advertising often has short-term effects that sales data might reflect, and longterm effects that most of us might easily overlook in subsequent sales data. Because of these limitations, sales data tend to be confusing and unreliable as indicators of advertising effectiveness.

Sophisticated marketing mix modeling is one way to measure these advertising effects on sales, but it often takes millions of dollars and years of effort, and it requires the building of pristine databases of sales information along with all of the marketing-input variables. Few companies have the budget, the patience, the accurate databases, and the technical knowledge necessary to succeed at marketing mix modeling. Even so, marketing mix modeling does not help us evaluate the contribution of a single commercial, but rather the cumulative effects of many different commercials over a long period of time. Also, marketing mix modeling does not tell us why the advertising worked, or why it failed to work. Was it the message, the media weight, or the media mix that made the advertising effective? Generally, marketing mix modeling cannot answer these types of questions. So, again, sales data is of limited value when you make critical decisions about your advertising.

A third barrier to better advertising is a pervasive tendency of many (but not all) advertising agencies to delay, undermine, and thwart efforts to objectively test their creative “babies.” Who wants a report card on the quality of their work? It’s very threatening. The results can upset the creative folks. The results can upset clients. The agency can lose control. Agencies can be quite creative in coming up with reasons to avoid copy testing. Some of our favorites:

• There’s no time. We have to be on air in five days, so we’ll just have to skip the testing.
• These ads are built on emotion and feelings, and you can’t measure such delicate, artful subtleties.
• We already tested the ads with a focus group during the development process.
• These are image ads, and you can’t test imagery with standard advertising testing techniques.
• We have so much equity in this campaign that it doesn’t matter what the testing results are. We can’t afford to change.
• We’re in favor of testing, but let’s remove those questions about purchase intent and persuasion from the questionnaire.
• We are in a new age, with new media and new messages, and none of the old copy-testing measures apply any more.

The fourth barrier to more effective advertising is the big creative ego. The belief that only the “creatives” in the agency can create advertising—and the conviction that creativity is their exclusive domain—constitute a major barrier. Great advertising tends to evolve over time, with lots of hard work, fine-tuning, and tinkering, based on objective feedback from target consumers. Big creative egos tend to resist such evolutionary improvements. We have seen great campaigns abandoned because agencies would not accept minor tweaks to the advertising. To be fair, big egos are not limited to advertising agencies. Big client egos can also be a barrier to good advertising. Research firm egos are yet another problem. Big egos create barriers because emotion is driving advertising decision-making instead of logic, reason, and consumer feedback. Big egos lead to bad advertising.

A fifth barrier to better advertising is the widespread belief that one’s major competitors know what they are doing. Just copy the advertising approaches of the competition and success will surely follow. We recently had a client who was about to copy the advertising strategy of a major competitor, but we were able to persuade the client to test all major competitive commercials as a precaution before blindly copying the competitor’s advertising approach. This competitor was the industry leader in market share and profitability. Our testing quickly revealed that this industry leader was the industry leader in spite of its bad advertising. The testing also revealed that another competitor, in contrast, had great advertising. Needless to say, the client’s desire to copy the industry leader quickly vanished.

The sixth barrier to better advertising is lack of strategy, or having a poor strategy. The client is most often at fault here. The client has not done his homework, has not thought deeply about his brand and its future, and has not developed and tested strategy alternatives. The client tells the agency to go forth and create great advertising, without providing any strategy guidelines. The agency is left to guess and speculate about strategy. Great advertising is rarely created in a strategy vacuum. If the client cannot define a sound strategy, the agency cannot create great advertising. Again, the responsibility for strategy falls squarely on the client.

A seventh barrier to better advertising is client ineptness. Some clients’ processes, policies, and people tend to discourage the creation of great advertising. Arrogance, ambiguity, impatience, ignorance, risk aversion, and inconsistency tend to be the hallmarks of these “agency killer” clients. Bad clients rarely stimulate or tolerate great advertising.

The eighth and last barrier to better advertising is poor copy testing by research companies. Many advertising testing systems are limited to a few markets (and therefore cannot provide representative samples). Some systems are so expensive that the cost of testing exceeds the value of the results. Research companies have been guilty of relying on one or two simplistic measures of advertising effectiveness, while completely ignoring many other very important variables. For instance, for several years research companies argued publicly over which was more important—persuasion measures or recall measures? The truth is that both are important, but of greater importance is the fact that neither of these measures alone, or in combination, measures advertising effectiveness. To judge the effectiveness of an ad, many different variables must be measured and considered simultaneously.

Creating Better Advertising

Given all of these barriers to better advertising, how can a client, agency, and research company work together to create more effective advertising?

• The client must craft a sound strategy for its brand, based on facts, not wishful thinking and self-delusion . The client must carefully define the role of advertising in the marketing plan and set precise communication objectives for the advertising. What exactly does the client want the advertising to convey, to accomplish? Agencies are too often asked to create advertising in an informational vacuum. Agencies are not miracle workers. Once strategy and positioning alternatives are identified and tested, the strategy should be locked down—and rarely changed thereafter.
• As creative executions are developed against the strategy, each execution should be pretested among members of the target audience . (“Pretesting” refers to testing advertising before it is aired and/ or before final production. When the term “testing” is used in this article, it is a shorthand term for “pretesting.”) The greater the number of executions tested, the more likely it is that great advertising will emerge. Testing the creative provides a reliable feedback loop that helps agency and client alike become smarter over time. Once a conceptual family of commercials is identified as the optimal campaign of the future, then the campaign should be locked down. Long-term continuity of an advertising message is essential to maximizing effectiveness.
• Use the same testing system consistently . There is no perfect advertising testing system. Some are better than others, but any system will help improve your advertising. The secret is to use one system over and over, so that everyone (client, agency, and researchers) learns how to interpret the testing results for the category and the specific brand.
• If budget permits, test the advertising at an early stage in the creative process (i.e., the “storyboard” or “animatic” stage) and also test at the finished commercial stage . Earlystage testing allows rough commercials to be tweaked and fine-tuned before you spend the big dollars on final production. Early-stage testing tends to be highly predictive of finished commercial scores, but not always. Testing the finished commercials gives you extra assurance that your advertising is “on strategy” and working.
• Build your own “action standards” over time . As you test every execution, you will begin to learn what works and what doesn’t work. Think of the testing company’s norms as very crude, rough indicators to help you get started with a testing program. But, as quickly as possible, develop your own norms for your category and your brand (yes, all of the advertising effectiveness measures vary by product category and brand). Long-term, what you are searching for are not norms, but action standards (that is, the knowledge that certain advertising testing scores will translate into actual sales increases).
• Use a mathematical model to derive an overall score for each execution . It doesn’t matter that an ad has great persuasion if it does not register the brand name. It doesn’t matter that an ad registers the brand name if no one will notice the commercial itself. It doesn’t matter that an ad increases short-term purchase interest if it will damage the brand’s quality reputation over time. So all of the key variables must be put together intelligently to come up with a composite or overall measure of advertising effectiveness.
• Use the testing results as a guide or as an indicator, but do not become a slave to the mathematical model . Read all of the open-ended questions carefully. Make sure you really understand the underlying reasons. Base your decisions on this comprehensive assessment of the results, and leave yourself some wiggle room. No model or system can anticipate every marketing situation or give a 100% perfect solution every time. Informed human judgment remains important.
• Clients and agencies need to accept that “continuous improvement” of the advertising is an important goal . This means that every execution is tested and tweaked based on scientific evidence from the target audience. We are not talking about changing the strategy or changing the campaign, but making sure that every execution is “on strategy” and working as hard as possible.
• The ultimate goal of testing is an advertising success formula that works . That is, the goal of advertising creative development, and the goal of advertising testing, is to identify the elements/ ideas essential to advertising effectiveness, and then to make sure that those elements/ ideas are consistently communicated by all advertising executions.

The Power of Advertising

We believe in the power of advertising, based on thousands of studies in our archives. Advertising has the power to persuade, the power to influence the mind, and the power to shape destiny. It has the power to change markets and improve profit margins. Advertising has short-term power (conveying new information, building awareness, enhancing credibility, etc.) and long-term power (conveying brand image, attaching emotional values to the brand, building positive reputation, etc.). The great power of advertising is seldom achieved in practice, but we can’t give up. The potential and the promise are too great. The companies that master the creative guidance and the testing systems to consistently develop and deploy great advertising will own the future and the fortunes that go with it. Great advertising is a cloak of invincibility.

About the Author

Jerry W. Thomas ( [email protected] ) is President/CEO of Dallas-Fort Worth based Decision Analyst. He may be reached at 1-800-262-5974 or 1-817-640-6166 .

Copyright © 2020 by Decision Analyst, Inc. This article may not be copied, published, or used in any way without written permission of Decision Analyst.

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How measurable is online advertising?

Researchers from Northwestern University and Facebook in March published new research in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science that sheds light on whether common approaches for online advertising measurement are as reliable and accurate as the "gold standard" of large-scale, randomized experiments.

The study to be published in the March edition of the INFORMS journal Marketing Science is titled "A Comparison of Approaches to Advertising Measurement: Evidence from Big Field Experiments at Facebook," and is authored by Brett Gordon of Northwestern University; Florian Zettelmeyer of Northwestern University and the National Bureau of Economic Research; and Neha Bhargava and Dan Chapsky of Facebook.

"Our findings suggest that commonly used observational approaches that rely on data usually available to advertisers often fail to accurately measure the true effect of advertising," said Brett Gordon.

Observational approaches are those that encompass a broad class of statistical models that rely on the data "as they are," generated without explicit manipulation through a randomized experiment.

"We found a significant difference in the ad effectiveness obtained from randomized control trials and those observational methods that are frequently used by advertisers to evaluate their campaigns," added Zettelmeyer. "Generally, the current and more common methods overestimate ad effectiveness relative to what we found in our randomized tests. Though in some cases, they significantly underestimate effectiveness."

Measuring the effectiveness of advertising remains an important problem for many firms. A key question is whether an advertising campaign produced incremental outcomes: did more consumers purchase because they saw an ad, or would many of those consumers have purchased even in the absence of the ad? Obtaining an accurate measure of incremental outcomes ("conversions") helps an advertiser calculate the return on investment (ROI) of the campaign.

"Digital platforms that carry advertising, such as Facebook, have created comprehensive means to assess ad effectiveness, using granular data that link ad exposures, clicks, page visit, online purchases and even offline purchases," said Gordon. "Still, even with these data, measuring the causal effect of advertising requires the proper experimentation platform."

The study authors used data from 15 U.S. advertising experiments at Facebook comprising 500 million user-experiment observations and 1.6 billion ad impressions.

Facebook's "conversion lift" experimentation platform provides advertisers with the ability to run randomized controlled experiments to measure the causal effect of an ad campaign on consumer outcomes.

These experiments randomly allocate users to a control group, who are never exposed to the ad, and to a test group, who are eligible to see the ad. Comparing outcomes between the groups provides the causal effect of the ad because randomization ensures the two groups are, on average, equivalent except for advertising exposures in the test group. The experimental results from each ad campaign served as a baseline with which to evaluate common observational methods.

Observational methods compare outcomes between users who were exposed to the ad to users who were unexposed. These two groups of users tend to differ systematically in many ways, such as age and gender. These differences in characteristics may be observable because the advertiser (or its advertising platform) often has access data on these characteristics and others, e.g., in addition to knowing the gender and age of an online user, it is possible to observe the type of device being used, the location of the user, how long it's been since the user last visited, etc. However, the tricky part is that the exposed and unexposed groups may also differ in ways that are very difficult to measure, such as the users underlying affinity for the brand. To say that the ad "caused" an effect requires the research to be able to account for both observed and unobserved differences between the two groups. Observational methods use data on the characteristics of the users that are observed in attempt to adjust for both the observable and unobservable differences.

"We set out to determine whether, as commonly believed, current observational methods using comprehensive individual-level data are 'good enough' for ad measurement," said Zettelmeyer. "What we found was that even fairly comprehensive data prove inadequate to yield reliable estimates of advertising effects."

"In principle, we believe that using large-scale randomized controlled trials to evaluate advertising effectiveness should be the preferred method for advertisers whenever possible."

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Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to correct word or phrase that best fits each of the numbered blanks. Teen spending    A large-scale study has been done by advertisers on the spending habits of today's teenagers. It has come up with some fascinating results. Girls across Europe ranging in age from 15 to 18 were interviewed. The researchers discovered that these girls want to be successful and sophisticated and are willing to spend to (29) __________ the look they want - when they have the money, that is!     Feeling confident is the most important factor when it comes to buying clothes. (30) __________ interesting piece of information coming out of the study is that German teenagers go for clothes that are pract and comfortable, while British and French teenagers are more concerned about appearance (31) ________________ they all agreed that the clothes should fit them properly. All the girls (32) _____________ were interviewed shop for clothes regularly, half of them buying something from a department store or a large clothes shop at least once a month. They also see it as a social (33) _____________ and going round the shops with their friends is the main way they learn what the latest trends are.  (Adapted from "Laser B2" by Malcomn Mann and Steve Taylor-Knowles)  The researchers discovered that these girls want to be successful and sophisticated and are willing to spend to (29) __________ the look they want - when they have the money, that is!    

Siêu phẩm 30 đề thi thử THPT quốc gia 2024 do thầy cô VietJack biên soạn, chỉ từ 100k trên Shopee Mall .

Kiến thức: Từ vựng  

Giải thích: 

A. achieve (v): đạt được 

B. reach (v): vươn tới 

C. manage (v): kiểm soát  

D. succeed (v): thành công 

The researchers discovered that these girls want to be successful and sophisticated and are willing to spend to (29) ______ the look they want 

Tạm dịch: 

Các nhà nghiên cứu đã phát hiện ra rằng những cô gái này muốn trở nên thành công và sành điệu và sẵn sàng chi tiêu để đạt được vẻ ngoài mà họ muốn 

Choose A. 

Câu hỏi cùng đoạn

A. Other  B. Few  C. Many  D. Another

Xem lời giải

Kiến thức: Lượng từ 

A. Other + N số nhiều 

B. Few + N đếm được số nhiều  

C. Many + N đếm được số nhiêud 

D. Another + N số ít  

A. but  B. although  C. so  D. for

Kiến thức: liên từ 

A. but: nhưng 

B. although: mặc dù 

C. so: vì vậy  

D. for: vì 

while British and French teenagers are more concerned about appearance (31) ______ they all agreed that the clothes should fit them properly 

trong khi thanh thiếu niên Anh và Pháp quan tâm nhiều hơn đến ngoại hình mặc dù tất cả họ đều đồng ý rằng quần áo phải vừa vặn với họ . 

Choose B. 

A. who  B. which  C. whom  D. whose

Kiến thức: Đại từ quan hệ  

A. who thay thế cho N chỉ người 

B. which thay thế cho N chỉ vật  

C. whom thay thế cho tân ngữ 

D. whose: sở hữu cách  

All the girls (32) ______ were interviewed shop for clothes regularly 

Tất cả các cô gái mà được phỏng vấn thì mua sắm quần áo thường xuyên 

A. circumstance  B. commitment  C. activity  D. aspiration

Kiến thức: kết hợp từ 

social acivity: hoạt động xã hội 

They also see it as a social (33) ______ 

Họ cũng coi đó là một hoạt động xã hội 

Choose C. 

Dịch bài đọc: 

Nội dung dịch:  

Một nghiên cứu quy mô lớn đã được thực hiện bởi các nhà quảng cáo về thói quen chi tiêu của thanh thiếu niên ngày nay. Nó đã đưa ra một số kết quả hấp dẫn. Các cô gái trên khắp châu Âu trong độ tuổi từ 15 đến 18 đã được phỏng vấn. Các nhà nghiên cứu đã phát hiện ra rằng những cô gái này muốn trở nên thành công và sành điệu và sẵn sàng chi tiêu để có được vẻ ngoài mà họ muốn - nghĩa là khi họ có tiền!

Cảm thấy tự tin là yếu tố quan trọng nhất khi mua quần áo. Một thông tin thú vị rút ra từ nghiên cứu là thanh thiếu niên Đức thích quần áo thiết thực và thoải mái, trong khi thanh thiếu niên Anh và Pháp quan tâm nhiều hơn đến ngoại hình vì vậy tất cả họ đều đồng ý rằng quần áo phải vừa vặn với họ. Tất cả các cô gái được phỏng vấn thì mua sắm quần áo thường xuyên, một nửa trong số họ mua thứ gì đó từ cửa hàng bách hóa hoặc cửa hàng quần áo lớn ít nhất mỗi tháng một lần. Họ cũng coi đó là một hoạt động xã hội và đi vòng quanh các cửa hàng với bạn bè là cách chính để họ tìm hiểu những xu hướng mới nhất. 

CÂU HỎI HOT CÙNG CHỦ ĐỀ

What is the passage mainly about? 

A. How useful test scores are 

B. Whether testing is an effective method to assess learners. 

C. The importance of taking TOEFL or IELTS. 

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the word whose underlined part differs from the other three in pronunciation in each of the following questions.

  according to the passage, which of the following statements is not true.

A. According to the law, if people have their parents' permission, they are allowed to marry at 18.

B. Nepalese families have a tendency to marry their daughters at a young age. 

C. Parents who marry their children before the allowed age normally pay a fine. 

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the underlined part that needs correction in each of the following questions.  Last week I have to bring work home every night to get it all done. 

Mark the letter a, b, c, or d on your answer sheet to indicate the word(s) opposite in meaning to the underlined word(s) in each of the following questions.  to an american, success is the result of hard work and self-reliance. , mark the letter a, b, c, or d on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the following questions.  your mother is cooking in the kitchen, ___________ .

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Lớp 12 – Luyện thi TN THPT & ĐH 2024

T Chính T Chí T Cường T Thắng T Nguyên

Cô Xuân Cô Phượng Cô Thắng Cô Phương

Thầy Chất Thầy Tùng

Cô Phương Thầy Linh Cô Thủy

Thầy Toản Thầy Thế Anh

Thầy Hải Thầy Mạnh

Thầy Hòa Thầy Nam Thầy Phong

Lớp 12 – LIVE PRO

Lớp 11 - 2k8.

T Chính T Tùng T Đăng T Huy T Toản T Chí T Nguyên

Cô Xuân Cô Ngọc Anh Cô Linh Cô Diễm

Thầy Linh Cô Thủy Cô Quỳnh Anh Cô Loan

Thầy Toản Cô Loan Thầy Vinh Thầy Long Thầy Bích

Thầy Hải Cô Châu Thầy Hoạch

Thầy Phong Cô Thanh Cô Linh

Tiết kiệm đến 61%

Lớp 10 - 2K9

T Chính T Toản T Nguyên C Hương

Cô Xuân Cô Huế Cô Kiều Thắng

Thầy Tùng Thầy Duy Thầy Chất

Cô Phương Cô Hương Thủy Cô Loan

Thầy Toản Cô Loan Thầy Vinh Thầy Bích

Thầy Hải Thầy Hoạch

Thầy Nam Cô Linh Cô Thanh

NỀN TẢNG LỚP 9 - LUYỆN THI VÀO 10

T Bảo C Loan C Hương C Yến

C Hương C Thảo C Hà C Hoàn C Thắng C Linh

T Tùng T Chất T Duy C Châu

C Tạ Thuỷ C Lan C Giang C Hương Thuỷ

T Hiển T Quang C Thanh

Tiết kiệm đến 66%

Lớp 9 – Luyện thi vào 10 - 2024

Thầy Cường Thầy Đông Thầy Bảo

Cô Hoàn Thầy Long Cô Linh Cô Lan

Cô Hòa Cô Tạ Thủy Cô Hương Thủy Cô Hà

Cô Loan Thầy Vinh

Tiết kiệm đến 77%

Lớp 9 – Luyện thi vào 10 - 2023

Lớp 8 - 2k11.

Thầy Bảo Cô Loan Cô Hải Cô Yến

Cô Hương Cô Hà Cô Phương Cô Thảo Cô Hoàn

Thầy Quang Thầy Hiển Cô Thanh Cô Vân Anh

Cô Lan Cô Hương Cô Giang

Thầy Tùng Thầy Chất Thầy Bích Cô Châu

Tiết kiệm đến 64%

Lớp 7 - 2K12

Thầy Bảo Cô Nhung Cô Trang Cô Yến

Cô Hương Cô Hà Phương Cô Vũ Xuân

Cô Tạ Thủy Cô Mai Hương

T Bích T Hoạch T Hải T Tùng T Chất C Trang C Hương

Tiết kiệm đến 68%

Lớp 6 - 2K13

Cô Hương Cô Ngọc Anh Cô Sinh Cô Xuân

Thầy Quang Thầy Hiển Thầy Phong Thầy Nam

Cô Thủy Cô Giang

Cô Loan Thầy Vinh Thầy Hải Thầy Tùng Thầy Chất

Lớp 5 - 2K13

Cô Phạm Thủy Cô Nhuần Cô Sao Mai

Cô Hương Cô Linh Cô Hoàn

Cô Phạm Thủy Cô Tô Thủy

Tiết kiệm đến 65%

Lớp 5 - 2K14 - 2025

C Mai C Liên C Ly C Nhuần T Thường

T Thảo C Trang C Thuỷ

Tiết kiệm đến 63%

Lớp 4 - 2K15

Cô Mai Cô Liên Cô Ly Thầy Thường

Cô Hương Cô Ngọc

Cô Thảo Cô Trang

Tiết kiệm đến 58%

Lớp 3 - 2K16

Cô Ly   Cô Thủy   Thầy Thường

Cô Thủy   Cô Thảo   Cô Hoa

Tiết kiệm đến 56%

Lớp 2 - 2K17

Cô Huyền   Cô Thảo

Tiết kiệm đến 41%

Lớp 1 - 2K18

• LỚP 12 - ÔN THI ĐGNL, ĐGTD
• Lớp 12 - Luyện thi TN THPT&ĐH
• Mã kích hoạt
• HOT! Khai giảng Khoá học Trực tuyến cấp Tiểu học và THCS năm 2024 - 2025
• 2K7! HOT! Mở Đặt Chỗ Sớm Lộ Trình Sun 2025! Ưu đãi tới 69%
• 2K6! Lộ Trình Sun 2024 - Ba bước luyện thi TN THPT - ĐH ít nhất 25 điểm
• 2K9 Chú ý! Khoá Học Bứt Phá Nền Tảng Lớp 9, Công Phá Thi Đỗ Lớp 10
• 2K11 Ơi! Bứt Phá Lớp 7 Năm Học 2023 - 2024
• 2K12! Bứt Phá Lớp 6 Năm Học 2023 - 2024
• Chương Trình Học Tốt Trung Học Cơ Sở Năm Học 2023-2024
• Lộ Trình Học Bứt Phá Lớp 2-9 Năm Học 2023-2024
• 2K7! Bứt Phá Lớp 11 2024! Chương trình mới (VOD + LIVE)
• 2K10! Bứt Phá Lớp 8 Năm Học 2023 - 2024
• 2K8! Bứt phá lớp 10! Chương trình mới (VOD + LIVE)
• Chương trình học tốt tiểu học năm học 2023-2024
• 2K13! Bứt Phá Lớp 5 Năm Học 2023 - 2024
• 2K14! Bứt Phá Lớp 4 Năm Học 2023 - 2024
• 2K15! Bứt Phá Lớp 3 Năm Học 2023 - 2024
• 2K16! Bứt Phá Lớp 2 Năm Học 2023 - 2024
• Học trực tuyến lớp 11 đủ môn cùng Thầy Cô giỏi, nổi tiếng
• Khai giảng các khóa lớp 9 Toán - Lý - Hóa - Văn - Anh năm 2018
• Khai giảng khóa Ngữ văn 7 - xây nền vững chắc cho tương lai!
• Luyện thi vào lớp 10 môn Toán, Văn, Hóa, Anh, Lý với giáo viên giỏi và nổi tiếng

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct  word that best fits each of the numbered blanks from 26 to 30.   TEEN SPENDING A large-scale study has been done by advertisers on the spending habits of today’s teenagers. It has come up  with some fascinating results. Girls across Europe ranging in age from 15 to 18 were interviewed. The  researchers discovered that these girls want to be successful and sophisticated and are willing to spend to (26)  ______ the look they want — when they have the money, that is!   Feeling confident is the most important factor when it comes to buying clothes. (27) ______ interesting piece of information coming out of the study is that German teenagers go for clothes that are practical and  comfortable, while British and French teenagers are more concerned about appearance, (28) ______ they all agreed that the clothes should fit them properly. All the girls (29) _______ were interviewed shop for clothes  regularly, half of them buying something from a department store or a large clothes shop at least once a month.  They also see it as a social (30) ______ and going round the shops with their friends is the main way they learn what the latest trends are.   (Adapted from “Laser B2” by Malcomn Mann and Steve Taylor-Knowles)

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct  word that best fits each of the numbered blanks from 26 to 30.  

TEEN SPENDING

A large-scale study has been done by advertisers on the spending habits of today’s teenagers. It has come up  with some fascinating results. Girls across Europe ranging in age from 15 to 18 were interviewed. The  researchers discovered that these girls want to be successful and sophisticated and are willing to spend to (26)  ______ the look they want — when they have the money, that is!  

Feeling confident is the most important factor when it comes to buying clothes. (27) ______ interesting piece of information coming out of the study is that German teenagers go for clothes that are practical and  comfortable, while British and French teenagers are more concerned about appearance, (28) ______ they all agreed that the clothes should fit them properly. All the girls (29) _______ were interviewed shop for clothes  regularly, half of them buying something from a department store or a large clothes shop at least once a month.  They also see it as a social (30) ______ and going round the shops with their friends is the main way they learn what the latest trends are.  

(Adapted from “Laser B2” by Malcomn Mann and Steve Taylor-Knowles)

• Xem lời giải

Giải chi tiết:

A. reach: đạt được (sau khi cân nhắc, thỏa thuận)

B. manage (v) xoay xở + to do sth

C. succeed (v) thành công + in

D. achieve: đạt được điều mong muốn

Thông tin: The researchers discovered that these girls want to be successful and sophisticated and are willing to spend to achieve the look they want - when they have the money, that is!  

Tạm dịch: Các nhà nghiên cứu phát hiện ra rằng những cô gái này muốn thành công và sành điệu và sẵn sàng chi tiêu để đạt được vẻ ngoài như mong muốn - nghĩa là khi họ có tiền!

Mẹo : Viết lời giải với bộ công thức đầy đủ tại đây

0 Bình luân

Thông tin: Another interesting piece of information coming out of the study is that

Tạm dịch: Một thông tin thú vị khác đến từ nghiên cứu là

A. although

A. although: mặc dù

B. so: vì vậy

C. or: hoặc là

D. because: bởi vì

Thông tin: Another interesting piece of information coming out of the study is that German teenagers go for clothes that are practical and  comfortable, while British and French teenagers are more concerned about appearance, although they all agreed that the clothes should fit them properly.

Tạm dịch: Một thông tin thú vị khác được đưa ra từ nghiên cứu là thanh thiếu niên Đức chọn quần áo thiết thực và thoải mái, trong khi thanh thiếu niên Anh và Pháp quan tâm hơn đến ngoại hình, mặc dù tất cả đều đồng ý rằng quần áo phải vừa vặn với họ.

N chỉ người + who + V

Thông tin: All the girls who were interviewed shop for clothes  regularly, half of them buying something from a department store or a large clothes shop at least once a month.  

Tạm dịch: Tất cả các cô gái được phỏng vấn đều mua sắm quần áo thường xuyên, một nửa trong số họ mua thứ gì đó từ cửa hàng bách hóa hoặc cửa hàng quần áo lớn ít nhất một lần mỗi tháng.

A. circumstance

B. inspiration

C. activity

D. commitment

A. circumstance (n) hoàn cảnh

B. inspiration (n) sự truyền cảm hứng

C. activity (n) hoạt động

D. commitment (n) sự cam kết

Thông tin: They also see it as a social activity and going round the shops with their friends is the main way they learn what the latest trends are.  

Tạm dịch: Họ cũng coi đây là một hoạt động xã hội và đi vòng quanh các cửa hàng với bạn bè là cách chính để họ tìm hiểu xu hướng mới nhất là gì.

Nội dung dịch:

Một nghiên cứu quy mô lớn đã được thực hiện bởi các nhà quảng cáo về thói quen chi tiêu của thanh thiếu niên ngày nay. Nó đã đưa ra một số kết quả hấp dẫn. Các cô gái trên khắp châu Âu trong độ tuổi từ 15 đến 18 đã được phỏng vấn. Các nhà nghiên cứu phát hiện ra rằng những cô gái này muốn thành công và sành điệu và sẵn sàng chi tiêu để đạt được vẻ ngoài như mong muốn - nghĩa là khi họ có tiền!

Cảm thấy tự tin là yếu tố quan trọng nhất khi mua quần áo. Một thông tin thú vị khác đến từ nghiên cứu là thanh thiếu niên Đức chọn quần áo thiết thực và thoải mái, trong khi thanh thiếu niên Anh và Pháp quan tâm hơn đến ngoại hình, mặc dù tất cả đều đồng ý rằng quần áo phải vừa vặn với họ. Tất cả các cô gái được phỏng vấn đều mua sắm quần áo thường xuyên, một nửa trong số họ mua thứ gì đó từ cửa hàng bách hóa hoặc cửa hàng quần áo lớn ít nhất một lần mỗi tháng. Họ cũng coi đây là một hoạt động xã hội và đi vòng quanh các cửa hàng với bạn bè là cách chính để họ tìm hiểu xu hướng mới nhất là gì.

>> Luyện thi TN THPT & ĐH năm 2024 trên trang trực tuyến Tuyensinh247.com. Học mọi lúc, mọi nơi với Thầy Cô giáo giỏi, đầy đủ các khoá: Nền tảng lớp 12; Luyện thi chuyên sâu; Luyện đề đủ dạng; Tổng ôn chọn lọc.

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A Large-Scale Study of Specific Reading Comprehension Disability

The results from a single study rarely make a substantial contribution to existing knowledge. This is true for all disciplines whether they are characterized by carefully controlled experimental studies in laboratories or less carefully controlled studies in the field. To further complicate matters, results often cannot be replicated because of modest sample sizes and over-simplified designs. Given the complexity and subtlety of most phenomena of interest, such as the study of specific reading comprehension disability, another approach is required.

One solution to this problem is a meta-analysis of the literature on a given topic. Meta-analysis is a method for quantitatively combining the results of many studies ( Cooper, Hedges, & Valentine, 2009 ). A successful meta-analysis a) summarizes existing studies in terms of an average weighted effect size; b) determines whether the observed variability in results across studies is more than would be expected due to chance, and (c) identifies variables that predict or explain variability in results across studies. An advantage of meta-analysis is that the studies incorporated usually have different investigators, different conditions, and different measures. Consequently, a strong result from a meta-analysis is unlikely to be specific to a given investigator, situation, or measure.

Of course, all methodologies, including meta-analysis, have disadvantages as well as advantages. For example, one disadvantage of meta-analysis is that comparing different studies can be like comparing apples to oranges. A second disadvantage is that the meta-analysis is completely dependent on the quality of the studies that have been carried out and included in the analysis (i.e., “garbage in, garbage out”). A third disadvantage is that because the studies have already been completed, limited flexibility exists in the kinds of questions that can be answered and the researcher has little power to design a study that will best address a given question. Finally, as a result of inconsistent inclusion of basic statistics required for doing meta-analysis in published studies, it may not be possible to include a substantial number of relevant studies in the meta-analysis.

A complementary approach for obtaining results that can substantially advance existing knowledge is a large-scale study. A large-scale study may include thousands or hundreds of thousands of participants as opposed to a hundred or less. Large samples yield estimates of effects with high precision and provide the power to detect subtle effects. Because large-scale studies typically are designed by a research team, the study can be designed specifically to answer the question of interest.

Large-scale studies complement meta-analyses in that the strengths of large-scale studies often address the weaknesses of meta-analysis. Conversely, some of the strengths of meta-analysis are weaknesses of large-scale studies. For example, large-scale studies tend to be carried out by a limited number of researchers using a given set of measures and conditions.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the construct of specific reading comprehension disability using a large scale. The data was supplied by Florida’s Progress Monitoring and Reporting Network (PMRN) database. Understanding the educational needs of students who comprehend poorly is critical for developing programs that teachers can use to improve reading comprehension for struggling readers.

Specific Reading Comprehension Disability

Most poor readers have difficulty decoding the words on the page and also understanding what they are trying to read ( Fletcher, Lyon, Fuchs, & Barnes, 2007 ; Vellutino & Fletcher, 2005 ). Their ability to comprehend what they hear typically exceeds their ability to comprehend what they read because they struggle with decoding ( Badian, 1999 ). An inability to fluently decode the words on the page has been viewed as a “bottleneck” that limits reading comprehension. This appears to be an accurate description of poor reading for children in the early phase of learning to read. However, some evidence exists that for older poor readers, a substantial proportion of them comprehend more poorly than would be expected on the basis of their decoding. For example, Yuill, & Oakhill (1991) reported that up to 10% of 7- to 11-year-olds in the United Kingdom have age-appropriate word reading skills yet are poor at comprehension. Readers whose comprehension is poor despite adequate decoding skills have been identified by other researchers in both Europe and North America ( Cain & Oakhill, 2007a ). Even if substantial numbers of readers exist whose comprehension is worse that their word reading skills, a remaining question is whether their comprehension problem is specific to reading. In other words, are there individuals who can read the words on the page adequately and comprehend oral language adequately, yet struggle specifically with reading comprehension?

Perfetti, Landi, and Oakhill (2005) sketch a developmental model of reading comprehension that might allow for individuals with a reading comprehension deficit to emerge that is specific to reading as opposed to general to oral and written language comprehension. Their developmental model has five key assumptions:

• General skill in reading comprehension and its related components increase with reading experience, and, with some component skills, with spoken language experience.
• Reading comprehension and listening comprehension are related throughout development. Their relation is reciprocal, with experience in each potentially affecting skill acquisition in the other. However, this does not mean that the two are “equal,” and substantial asymmetries can develop (italics added).
• Word identification skill sets a limit on how closely reading comprehension skill can approach listening comprehension skill. It specifically limits comprehension early in reading development.
• Knowledge of word meanings is central to comprehension. This knowledge derives from multiple sources, including written and spoken comprehension, and grows indefinitely.
• Higher levels of comprehension require the reader to apply a high standard of coherence to his or her understanding of the text. ( Perfetti et al., 2005 , pp. 246–247).

The assumptions are straight forward with the possible exception of the last one. The assumption that higher levels of comprehension require the reader to apply a high standard of coherence means simply that skilled readers adopt a high standard with respect to the passage making sense (i.e., being coherent), and they make necessary inferences and perhaps reread if necessary until the message makes sense. Acknowledging that substantial asymmetries between reading and oral language comprehension can develop allows for the occurrence of specific reading comprehension disability.

Hallmarks of Successful Reading Comprehension

To understand reading comprehension disability, it helps to begin by considering what successful reading comprehension requires One way to answer this question is to study readers who comprehend what they read and carry out developmental studies to see how their success at reading comprehension develops ( Cain & Oakhill, 2009 ; Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2004 ; Nation, 2009 ; Oakhill & Cain, 2007 ; Perfetti et al, 2005 ; Priya & Wagner, 2009 ; Radach, Schmitten, Glover, & Huestegge, 2009 ; Van den Broek, White, Kendeou, & Carlson, 2009 ). A complementary approach is to study individuals who struggle with reading comprehension ( Cain & Oakhill, 2006 , 2007a , 2007b ; Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2000 ; Eason & Cutting, 2009 ; Oakhill & Cain, 2000 ; Nation, 2005 ; Swanson, Howard, & Saez, 2007 ).

The results from studies of both successful and struggling readers suggest that successful reading comprehension is characterized by a number of attributes that also have been shown to be lacking in the reading of individuals who struggle to comprehend what they read ( Cain & Oakhill, 2009 ):

• Fluent decoding . Recognizing the words on the page accurately and efficiently.
• Adequate vocabulary . Knowing the meanings of the individual words on the page.
• Adequate syntactic knowledge . Adequate syntactic knowledge facilitates processing of complex syntactic structures of complex sentences.
• Knowledge of cohesive cues . Pronouns, anaphors (i.e., when a word at the beginning of a sentence is used at the beginning of following sentences), and other connectives serve to allow the reader to develop a coherent understanding that spans individual sentences.
• Inference . Comprehending written text requires many kinds of inference to fill in gaps between what was stated explicitly and what was meant.
• Comprehension monitoring . Knowing whether one is or is not comprehending is a key part of successful comprehension for all but very simple material.
• Knowledge of text structure . Most written material has a definite structure associated with a genre. Knowing that structure can facilitate comprehension.
• Working memory . Reading comprehension requires a work space of sufficient size to store various intermediate products while actively working one’s way through the reading material.
• Relevant background knowledge . Fully understanding written material typically requires that the reader possess considerable background knowledge.

As Perfetti et al. (2005) aptly note, there are many reasons why reading comprehension might fail. The purpose of the present study was to characterize reading comprehension failure in a large-scale study for which measures of reading comprehension, decoding, and vocabulary were available. Our strategy was to identify students who were poor at reading comprehension and then to determine how many of them were (a) adequate at decoding, and (b) adequate at vocabulary as well as decoding.

Participants

The PMRN is a database consisting of approximately one and three-quarter million students in Florida. The majority of the sample consists of students in kindergarten through third grade, although there is some representation of students in all grades through 12 th grade. Most but not all of the students are enrolled in Reading First schools throughout the state of Florida. Females represent 48.3% of the sample and males the remaining 51.6%. Regarding racial and ethnic background, 42.1% of the sample is White, Non-Hispanic; 24.5% is Black, Non-Hispanic; 26.6% is Hispanic; 1.9% is Asian or Pacific Islander; 0.3% is American Indian or Alaskan Native; and 3.7% is Multiracial.

Students in the study were in first, second, or third grade during the 2003/2004 school year.

The study relied on four measures:

The Stanford Achievement Test (SAT)—Reading Comprehension served as our measure of reading comprehension. It was group-administered at the end of the school year.

The Nonsense Word Fluency (DIBELS) served as our measure of decoding for the first- and second-grade samples. This individually-administered task is a measure of how many nonwords students can pronounce in 60 seconds.

The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test . This is an individually-administered measure of receptive vocabulary that requires students to point to a picture that represents a target vocabulary word.

The Gates-McGinnite Reading Vocabulary Test is a measure of reading vocabulary. It served as a composite measure of decoding and vocabulary for the third-grade sample.

The design of the study required establishing operational definitions of impaired reading comprehension, adequate decoding, and adequate vocabulary. Our operational definition of impaired reading comprehension for all three grades was scoring at or below the 5 th percentile on the reading comprehension section of the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT) . Our operational definition of adequate decoding for the first- and second-grade samples was scoring at or above the 25 th percentile on Nonsense Word Fluency . Our operational definition of adequate vocabulary for the first- and second-grade samples was scoring at or above the 25 th percentile on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test . Nonsense Word Fluency was not available for the third-grade sample, so the Reading Vocabulary test of the Gates-McGinnite served as a composite measure of decoding and vocabulary.

Results and Discussion

The results of this study are presented in Table 1 . Beginning with the first-grade column, there were 33,314 first-grade students. The number of students who scored at or below the 5 th percentile was 1,669. Of these students who were impaired in reading comprehension, only 85, or 0.2% of the total sample were adequate in decoding. Thus, over 95% of first-grade students who were impaired in reading comprehension were inadequate decoders. Only 23 students out of the 1,669 students who were impaired in reading comprehension were adequate in both decoding and vocabulary. This represents only 0.1% of the total sample.

Number and Percentage of Students Meeting Alternative Reading Comprehension Disability Criteria by Grade

Moving to the second-grade column, 1,403 students out of the total sample of 32,820 were impaired at reading comprehension. Of these students, 735 or approximately half of the second-grade students who were impaired in reading comprehension were adequate in decoding. This result is markedly different from the first-grade results for which over 95% of students who were impaired in reading comprehension were inadequate in decoding. However, only 72 or 0.2% were adequate in both decoding and vocabulary.

Moving to the third-grade column, 568 students out of the total of 36,925 were impaired in reading comprehension. This means that only 1.5% of the third-grade sample scored at or below the 5 th percentile in reading comprehension. Why this percentage is well below the expected 5 th percentile is unknown. With the Gates-McGinnite serving as a composite measure of both decoding and vocabulary, only 34 or 0.1% of third-grade students were impaired in reading comprehension yet adequate in the composite decoding and vocabulary measure.

In summary, in first grade, nearly all students who were impaired in reading comprehension were inadequate in decoding. By second grade, however, roughly half of the students who were impaired in reading comprehension were adequate at decoding. However, less than 1% of second-grade students who were impaired at reading comprehension were adequate at both decoding and vocabulary. In third grade, having to rely on the composite measure that combined decoding and vocabulary, it was not possible to estimate the percentage of students who were impaired at reading comprehension yet adequate at decoding. However, the results were similar to those of second grade as less than 1% of students were impaired at reading comprehension yet adequate at the composite measure of decoding and vocabulary.

One might wonder whether the results are specific to defining impaired reading comprehension as scoring at or below the 5 th percentile. To find out, we did a parallel set of analyses on the second-grade cohort but used a less stringent cut-off to study poor as opposed to impaired reading comprehension.

The less stringent cut-off we used for our operational definition of poor reading comprehension for this analysis was scoring at or below the 20 th percentile on the reading comprehension section of the end-of-year Stanford Achievement Test . Our operational definition of adequate decoding was revised to scoring at or above the 40 th percentile on Nonsense Word Fluency and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test defined adequate vocabulary.

The results are presented in Table 2 . Of these students, 7,857 or 23.1% met the criterion for poor reading comprehension of scoring at or below the 20 th percentile on the Stanford Achievement Test . The number of students who were poor at reading comprehension who were adequate at decoding (i.e., scoring at or above the 40 th percentile on Nonsense Word Fluency ) was 1,786, or 5.4% of the original sample. Of these students, only 242 or 0.7% were adequate in both decoding and vocabulary.

Number and Percentage of Students in Second-Grade Cohort Meeting Less Stringent Reading Comprehension Criteria

General Discussion

Access to the PMRN data set allowed us to examine the construct of specific reading disability. Beginning with relationship between problems in decoding and reading comprehension, the results support a changing relationship as a function of grade. In first grade, less than 1% of all readers could be considered impaired in reading comprehension and adequate at decoding. By second grade, however, half of the students who were poor in reading comprehension were adequate in decoding.

When vocabulary was considered, considerably less than 1% (0.1 to 0.2%) of students in either first, second, or third grade was impaired at reading comprehension yet adequate at both decoding and vocabulary. These results do not support the construct of specific reading comprehension disability if it means impaired reading comprehension performance but adequate oral language performance (i.e., vocabulary). These results are consistent with other studies of children who were impaired at reading comprehension and for whom oral language measures were available ( Cain & Oakhill, 2007a ; Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2000 ). When oral language assessments are given to students who are poor at reading comprehension, their comprehension deficit typically extends to oral language comprehension. When the operational definition of poor reading comprehension was relaxed to include all readers scoring at or below the 20 th percentile, the pattern of results remained the same.

It is important to point out that the population from which our samples were drawn was primarily students in Reading First schools in the state of Florida. Compared to the population of all students in Florida, our samples were more diverse, had higher poverty, and were more at risk for reading and other academic problems. The extent to which our results would generalize to a population less at risk for reading problems cannot be determined.

In summary, most poor readers fall into one of two categories. The first category is the classical reading disabled student whose primary problem is decoding. The decoding problem impairs comprehension and probably has other long-term negative consequences such as hindering the future development of vocabulary through reading. The second kind of poor reader is adequate in decoding but impaired in reading comprehension. The primary problem for this kind of poor reader is a deficit in language (e.g., specific language impairment) or general cognitive ability. Our results do not support the idea that specific reading comprehension disability—or a deficit in comprehension that is specific to reading as opposed to general to both oral and written language comprehension—is a common occurrence.

Acknowledgments

Support for this research was provided by grant P50 HD052120 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Biographies

Richard Wagner, Ph.D., is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology and an Associate Director of the Florida Center for Reading Research. He earned a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Yale University, and a Master’s Degree in School Psychology from the University of Akron. He directs an NICHD Multidisciplinary Learning Disabilities Center at the Florida Center for Reading Research.

Caitlin Ridgewell is an undergraduate at Emory University and hopes to pursue a career in clinical psychology in the future. She is currently employed at Emory University’s Women’s Mental Health Program as well in the NICHD Multidisciplinary Learning Disabilities Center at the Florida Center for Reading Research as a research assistant.

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Page One Economics ®

Advertising: dollars and decisions.

Mass demand has been created almost entirely through the development of advertising."  —Calvin Coolidge, October 27, 1926 1

Introduction

Having dollars in your pocket is one thing; keeping them there is another. With so many businesses selling goods and services, there's a lot of competition in the marketplace for the money in your pocket. In fact, consum ers are bombarded with as many as 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements each day! 2 This advertising is designed to increase or create demand for products by influencing consumers' choices about spending . Through persuasion, some dollars in your pocket are spent because of advertising. 

Advertising Benefits

Advertising benefits both buyers and sellers. It provides information to consumers about new products available and the advantages of buying and using the advertised goods or services. It's also a low-cost way for consumers to get information; they simply have to view the information when it is placed in front of them. Consumers often become aware of a product through advertising, and the introduction of a new product might lead to lower prices of like products—so consumers benefit. For example, consumers might learn about Pizza Express through advertisements—and Pizza Express might offer a great price . Other pizza providers might feel they need to offer lower prices to compete with Pizza Express. Con­sumers benefit through lower prices for pizzas. Additionally, the price of newspapers, magazines, television, radio, the Internet, and other media is lower to consumers because advertising finances much of the cost of these services. And finally, advertising benefits businesses as well by increasing the demand for goods and services, thus increasing sales.

The Purpose of Advertising

Advertisements, or ads, can serve different purposes. They may be designed to nurture established brand loyalty or to introduce new brands. Using slogans, logos, jingles, unique packaging, and designs in advertising helps create the "brand personality" and familiarity with products and influence consumer choices. For example, even before they can read, most children recognize the McDonald's golden arches, influencing their taste and preference for McDonald's and possibly increasing demand for McDonald's products. Advertising can strengthen the loyalty of current users and tries to send a persuasive message to other consumers to switch brands.

Types of Advertising

Ads are used to deliver a message to consumers. Some advertisements are only in print format with or without illustrations. Others are commercials, originally called commercial messages, and may include audio only or audio and visuals. These are usually between 10 and 60 seconds in length. 3 Very lengthy advertisements are called infomercials. An infomercial may be 30 minutes long and demonstrate a product. Such demonstrations usually show how the product can benefit consumers and offer a special "buy now" deal to entice consumers to purchase the product right away.  

Advertising as a Business

Advertising is a fast-paced, growing, and ever-changing business. Given the massive number of advertisements, it is an industry itself. The American Advertising Federa­tion (AAF), established in 1905, recognizes outstanding advertising work and offers guidance in building and advancing careers in advertising. The AAF even offers job opportunities to assist in developing a career in advertising. 4  

People design and create ads that will influence consumer spending. Paying attention to details, color, words, design, and appearance, as well as the media type(s) to be used, advertising agencies go to great lengths to present products most favorably. Advertising researchers collect responses from consumer test groups to pretest advertisements and fine-tune them down to the smallest details before they are released. 

Advertising Timeline

In the United States, Benjamin Franklin is honored for advancing advertising in the mid-1700s. At a time when advertising was almost nonexistent, Franklin was the publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette . Working to become more profitable, he devised a way to lower the paper's cost by selling newspaper ads. The idea was not successful at first because Franklin could not convince other businesses to buy ads. Trying a different approach, he began to advertise one of his own inventions, the Franklin stove. When sales of the stove boomed, other businesses took notice and began to buy ads in the Pennsylvania Gazette . Franklin was able to produce his paper at a lower cost and sell his newspaper at a lower price. Advertising was a win-win situation for Franklin and his advertisers. Advertis­ing appealed to people's tastes and preferences and increased the demand for his newspaper. He soon moved ahead of his competition and earned more prof it . 5 With a place in the Advertising Hall of Fame, Franklin is referred to as "the original voice of America, selling products and services, community programs, democracy and America itself through written and spoken word." 6

By the late 1800s, long and wordy advertisements began to fade as advertisements advanced to include catchy phrases or slogans. 7 The idea was to use a single phrase to make the product memorable—for example, Ivory soap was marketed by Proctor and Gamble as the "soap that floats." 8

Radio broadcasting began on a large scale in the 1920s. The Golden Age of Radio began around 1925, and in 1926 the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) made plans for radios to be in 26 million American homes. 9 This Golden Age of Radio enhanced advertising and moved it from the written word to other methods of communication: music, jingles, and the spoken word.

Figure 1 SOURCE: Richter, Felix. "50 Years of Growth Wiped Out in a Decade." statista.com, September 17, 2012; https://www.statista.com/chart/612/newspaper-advertising-revenue-from-1950-to-2012/ , accessed March 21, 2017. Used by permission.

Television opened a whole new world of advertising, and its growth affected the print venue (Figure 1). In 1936, there were only 200 television sets in use, 10 but by 1992 there were 201 million televisions in the United States. 11 In 2004, more than 98 percent of American households had a television and the average home had more than two. 12 In 2016, on average, American adults watched about 5 hours of television per day. 13  

Television offers exposure to a large number of consumers at the same time—and predictably, the networks are filled with commercials. In 2015, the Fox News Channel had the most commercials of all networks overall with almost 17 minutes of each hour devoted to commercials. The CBS television network had almost 14½ minutes, while ABC and NBC had almost 14 minutes per hour. 14

On average, there are 38 ads airing every minute over national television networks. For these ads, advertisers use research and data to target the "right people" in the most effective way.  Some considerations include when to run an ad and the length of the ad. For example, data from 2013 reveal that 125 million people use television on Sunday, which is more than on any other day of the week. In this same year, the number of 15-second ads increased to 44 percent of all ads and were equally effective as longer ads. 15 Changes in the demographics of the population are essential data as well.

Beginning in the 1990s, the Internet and the computer age of global communication began a new era of advertising. In fact, the world's largest advertiser, Procter & Gamble, has begun shifting more to digital advertising because the company believes online ads are progressively a better investment than TV or print ads. 16

Today, smartphones and mobile devices are getting their share of the advertising spotlight and the trend is expected to continue. Forecasters predict that by 2019 advertising on mobile devices will reach $160 billion and become the second-largest advertising medium, while television will retain the number one spot. 17 (See Figure 2 for estimated changes in ad spending.)

Figure 2 SOURCE: Richter, Felix. "Money Follows Eyeballs – Mobile Ad Boom Continues." Statistics Portal, December 6, 2016; https://www.statista.com/chart/5096/worldwide-ad-spending-growth-by-medium/ . Used by permission.

Advertising Targets

Determining the target audience of an ad and tapping into the interest of a specific group is an important marketing strategy. Targeted audiences change and vary with cultures and time. Some identified groups are children, families, budget-conscious consumers, health-conscious consumers, sports-minded consumers, older or retired consumers, and working consumers. In each case, ads are designed and tailored to address the characteristics of the particular consumer group and influence their choices. The delivery medium is also important in targeting the identified group. For example, ads for beauty products are more effective in a women's magazine rather than on the radio (see the "Common Advertising Venues" boxed insert).

Advertising Techniques

Some ads are purely informational and provide basic information such as price, size, and quantity. Products have professionally designed and recognizable labels. Sometimes brand labels and the packaging itself can serve as an ad. For example, a tube of toothpaste is not labeled simply "toothpaste" but includes the brand name and some descriptive characteristics such as "New and Improved," "Fresh Tasting," "Great Tasting," "Helps Prevent Cavities," or "Whitening." Adding cartoon characters and bright cheerful colors on cereal boxes can influence children's tastes and preferences, creating greater demand for cereal by children. Depending on the product and targeted audience, most ads use one or a combination of techniques to influence consumer spending and persuade consumers of the value of the product (see the "Common Advertising Techniques" boxed insert). But in all cases, the tastes and preferences of consumers are considered in an effort to affect  decisionmaking .

Advertising Pricing

The first official paid television ad in the United States was broadcast in 1941 as a short and simple ad for a Bulova watch. Broadcast before a baseball game in New York, the total cost for the ad was less than $10. This was the beginning of an advertising industry that now generates tens of billions of dollars per year. 

Since that time, the cost of advertising has increased dramatically. In 2016, national TV commercials cost, on average, around $8,000 for a 30-second spot. 18 Pricing of advertising depends on factors such as the size of the print ad or length of time for the radio or TV ad. Costs can vary widely by publication or program, depending on the size of the potential audience. 

Figure 3 SOURCE: Loesche, Dyfe. "Nearly 1 in 4 Super Bowl Fans Watch for TV Commercials." statista.com, February 5, 2016; https://www.statista.com/chart/4325/reasons-to-watch-super-bowl/ , accessed March 21, 2017. Used by permission.

The Super Bowl is an example of incredibly expensive advertising. Since 2010, the Super Bowl has been the most-watched TV broadcast of each year—114 million viewers watched the 2015 Super Bowl. Advertising during this game is a great opportunity to influence the spending of millions of consumers. Interestingly, many people watch the game just to see the commercials (Figure 3). And with the massive number of viewers, the price of advertising continues to increase radically (Figure 4). A 30-second commercial for the first Super Bowl in 1967 cost $42,000, and the price increased to over $1 million in 1995. By 2015, the price had risen to $4.5 million and moved higher to $5 million in 2016, which amounted to $166,666 per second. 19 For the 2017 Super Bowl, advertisers paid as much as $5.02 million for a 30-second commercial. 20

Figure 4 SOURCE: Richter, Felix. "Super Bowl Ad Prices Doubled in a Decade." statista.com, January 16, 2017; https://www.statista.com/chart/826/super-bowl-tv-advertising-in-the-united-states/ , accessed March 21, 2017. Used by permission.

The purpose of advertising has remained constant over time: to create demand for products by influencing consumer tastes and preferences. However, advertising techniques and strategies have changed and will continue to do so. Ben Franklin would surely be amazed with the innovative approaches used today to communicate promotional messages that affect consumer choices and the dramatic growth of the advertising industry. 

Mark Twain said, "Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising." Finding the "right kind" of advertising presents challenges to both advertisers and consumers. Changing technology and demographics force advertisers to change strategies, venues, and messages as they showcase their products. Conse­quently, the challenge continues for consumers to use the "right kind" of decisionmaking. As a consumer, it is your responsibility to carefully analyze and evaluate ads. That is, if you want to keep more dollars in your pocket.

1 Coolidge, Calvin. Address Before the American Association of Advertising Agencies. Washington, DC., October 27, 1926; http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=412 .

2 Marshall, Ron. "How Many Ads Do You See in One Day?" Red Crow Marketing. September 10, 2015; http://www.redcrowmarketing.com/2015/09/10/many-ads-see-one-day/ .

3 Martin, Amie. "What Are the Differences Between Advertisements and Commercials?" Houston Chronicle , 2017; http://smallbusiness.chron.com/differences-between-advertisements-commercials-10353.html .

4 American Advertising Federation. http://www.aaf.org/ .

5 Bennett, Jeannette. "Ben Franklin: Highlighting the Printer." Lesson plan, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 2012, pp.14-15; https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/Education/Lessons/pdf/Ben-Franklin-Highlighting-the-Printer.pdf .

6 Advertising Hall of Fame. "Benjamin Franklin: Founder, Publisher & Copyrighter, Magazine General." 2017; http://advertisinghall.org/members/member_bio.php?memid=632&uflag=f&uyear= .

7 O'Barr, William M. "A Brief History of Advertising in America." Advertising & Society Review , 2005, 6 (3); https://muse.jhu.edu/article/193868 .

8 "Ivory Soap." Ohio History Central; http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Ivory_Soap , accessed February 12, 2017.

9 Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. "Turn Your Radio On." Lesson 5 in The Great Depression curriculum; https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/Files/PDFs/Great-Depression/the-great-depression-lesson-5.pdf .

10 SoftSchools.com. "Television Timeline." http://www.softschools.com/timelines/television_timeline/31/ , accessed February 24, 2017.

11 datesandevents.org. "Television Invention Timeline." http://www.datesandevents.org/events-timelines/08-television-invention-timeline.htm , accessed February 24, 2017. 

12 University of Texas at Austin. "Television History—A Timeline, 1878-2005." https://tarltonapps.law.utexas.edu/exhibits/mason_&_associates/documents/timeline.pdf , accessed February 24, 2017. 

13 Koblin, John. "How Much Do We Love TV? Let Us Count the Ways." New York Times , June 30, 2016; https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/business/media/nielsen-survey-media-viewing.html?_r=0 .

14 Friedman, Wayne. "Fox Television Network, Fox News Highest In Commercial Clutter." May 20, 2016; http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/276342/fox-television-network-fox-news-highest-in-commer.html .

15 "Advertising & Audiences, State of the Media." Nielsen Company, May 2014; http://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/nielsenglobal/jp/docs/report/2014/Nielsen_Advertising_and_%20Audiences%20Report-FINAL.pdf .  

16 O'Reilly, Lara. "These Are the 10 Companies That Spend the Most on Advertising." Business Insider , July 6, 2015; http://www.businessinsider.com/10-biggest-advertising-spenders-in-the-us-2015-7/#1-procter-and-gamble-ad-spend-down-42-to-46-billion-the-cpg-giant-is-also-the-worlds-largest-advertiser-although-this-spring-the-companys-cfo-revealed-a-plan-to-cut-spend-on-ad-agencies-by-up-to-500-million-the-company-is-also-shifting-huge-amounts-of-its-budget-to-digital-advertising-because-it-believes-online-ads-deliver-a-higher-return-on-investment-than-tv-or-print-one-of-its-most-popular-campaigns-of-last-year-was-its-always-likeagirl-spot-which-has-been-viewed-on-youtube-more-than-58-million-times-10.

17 Richter, Felix. "Money Follows Eyeballs—Mobile Ad Boom Continues." December 6, 2016; https://www.statista.com/chart/5096/worldwide-ad-spending-growth-by-medium/ .

18 Rodriguez, Ashley. "Watch: The First TV Commercial, Which Aired 75 Years Ago Today." Quartz, July 1, 2016; https://qz.com/721431/watch-the-first-tv-commercial-which-aired-75-years-ago-today/ .

19 Schwartz, Nick. "Stunning Infographic Charts the Skyrocketing Cost of a Super Bowl Ad." USA Today Sports , February 6, 2016; http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/02/how-much-does-super-bowl-ad-cost .

20 Duffy, Thomas. "Super Bowl Ads 2017: Latest Info on Cost of 2017 Super Bowl Commercials." Bleacher Report , February 5, 2017; http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2691154-super-bowl-ads-2017-latest-info-on-cost-of-2017-super-bowl-commercials .

© 2017, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect official positions of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis or the Federal Reserve System.

Advertising: Communication used by businesses to persuade consumers to buy a good or service.

Choice: A decision made between two or more possibilities or alternatives.

Consumers: People who buy goods and services to satisfy their wants.

Decisionmaking: Deciding among choices (alternatives or options).

Demand: The quantity of a good or service that buyers are willing and able to buy at all possible prices during a certain time period.

Market (marketplace): Buyers and sellers coming together to exchange goods, services, and/or resources.

Price: The amount of money, determined by the interaction of buyers and sellers, that a buyer must pay to acquire a good, service, or resource.

Profit: The amount of revenue that remains after a business pays the costs of producing a good or service.

Spending: Using some or all of your income to buy things you want now.

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Effects of Alcohol Advertising Exposure on Drinking Among Youth

Author Affiliations: Department of Communications Sciences (Drs Snyder and Milici and Mss Sun and Strizhakova) and Center for Health Communication and Marketing (Dr Snyder), University of Connecticut, Storrs; and Department of Journalism and Technical Communication, Colorado State University, Ft Collins (Dr Slater). Dr Slater is currently at the School of Communication, Ohio State University, Columbus. Dr Strizhakova is currently at the Department of Communication and Journalism, Suffolk University, Boston, Mass.

• Editorial Importance of Reducing Youth Exposure to Alcohol Advertising David H. Jernigan, PhD Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine
• Editorial Do As I Say, Not As I Do Susan J. Curry, PhD; Robin J. Mermelstein, PhD Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine
• Editorial Discussing Outcome in Tourette Syndrome Harvey S. Singer, MD Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine

Objective   To test whether alcohol advertising expenditures and the degree of exposure to alcohol advertisements affect alcohol consumption by youth.

Design   Longitudinal panel using telephone surveys.

Setting   Households in 24 US media markets, April 1999 to February 2001.

Participants   Individuals aged 15 to 26 years were randomly sampled within households and households within media markets. Markets were systematically selected from the top 75 media markets, representing 79% of the US population. The baseline refusal rate was 24%. Sample sizes per wave were 1872, 1173, 787, and 588. Data on alcohol advertising expenditures on television, radio, billboards, and newspapers were collected.

Main Exposures   Market alcohol advertising expenditures per capita and self-reported alcohol advertising exposure in the prior month.

Main Outcome Measure   Self-reported number of alcoholic drinks consumed in the prior month.

Results   Youth who saw more alcohol advertisements on average drank more (each additional advertisement seen increased the number of drinks consumed by 1% [event rate ratio, 1.01; 95% confidence interval, 1.01-1.02]). Youth in markets with greater alcohol advertising expenditures drank more (each additional dollar spent per capita raised the number of drinks consumed by 3% [event rate ratio, 1.03; 95% confidence interval, 1.01-1.05]). Examining only youth younger than the legal drinking age of 21 years, alcohol advertisement exposure and expenditures still related to drinking. Youth in markets with more alcohol advertisements showed increases in drinking levels into their late 20s, but drinking plateaued in the early 20s for youth in markets with fewer advertisements. Control variables included age, gender, ethnicity, high school or college enrollment, and alcohol sales.

Conclusion   Alcohol advertising contributes to increased drinking among youth.

The causes of alcohol use among youth, including older children, adolescents, and young adults, are a major public health concern. Drinking among youth can result in a panoply of negative consequences, including poor grades, risky sex, alcohol addiction, and car crashes. 1 - 4 Drinkers younger than 21 years, who consume approximately 20% of all alcoholic drinks, 5 imbibe more heavily than adults per drinking episode 6 and are involved in twice as many fatal car crashes while drinking. 7 The problem is getting worse, with youth initiating drinking at an earlier age on average than they did in the past. 8

There is much public policy debate about whether alcohol advertising is partially responsible for youth consumption levels. The alcohol industry is not subject to federal restrictions on their advertising practices but has voluntary advertising codes created by the major alcohol trade groups. Even when the alcohol industry adheres to a code requiring that at least 70% of the audience (50% before fall 2003) for print, radio, and television advertisements consist of adults of legal drinking age, many youth are exposed to alcohol advertisements. 9 , 10 There are often greater concentrations of alcohol advertisements in media aimed at youth than at adults. 10 - 13 However, studies of advertising content and youth exposure rates have not assessed the impact of advertising on youth. In 1997, the US Congress asked the National Institutes of Health for more scientific evidence on the relationship between advertising and alcohol use among those younger than the legal drinking age. 14

The most important question regarding alcohol advertising effects is whether the association between alcohol advertising and use is causal. 14 Cross-sectional surveys have found small, statistically significant, positive correlations (mean r  = 0.19) between self-reported alcohol advertising and youth drinking, 15 - 19 but they cannot establish causality. 20 Cumulative exposure to alcohol advertising and some effective advertising campaigns may change the way youth think about alcoholic beverages 21 - 27 and may increase drinking. Recently, exposure to some forms of alcohol advertising has been linked to drinking onset. 28 On the other hand, drinkers like alcohol advertisements more than nondrinkers like the advertisements, 24 , 26 have greater brain responses to alcohol advertisements, 29 and may remember them better. 25 , 30 An association between advertising exposure and drinking may therefore be due in part to drinkers reporting greater exposure than nondrinkers. It is also possible that advertisements induce drinkers to drink more. Another approach to research on alcohol advertising has shown that bans lead to a reduction in aggregate alcohol consumption, 31 , 32 but it is unknown how bans would affect youth.

We examined a national cohort of youth longitudinally to assess the effects of alcohol advertising on drinking amounts over time. The first hypothesis was that youth who reported greater exposure to alcohol advertising would have increased alcohol use over time. The second hypothesis concerned the effect of living in an environment with comparatively greater or fewer alcohol advertisements. By examining market-level measures of advertising expenditures per capita, we avoid the potential self-reporting bias among drinkers. We predicted that greater alcohol advertising expenditures per capita are correlated with greater youth drinking.

A random sample of youth aged 15 to 26 years from 24 US Nielsen media markets were interviewed 4 times during 21 months. Interviews were conducted in April through July 1999, December through January 2000, May through June 2000, and December through January 2001, using computer-aided telephone interviewing.

Twenty-four media markets were sampled to enable comparisons of advertising incidence across markets. Industry data on advertising were available for the 75 largest Nielsen media markets 33 in the United States, representing the 79% of the US population that lives in markets with populations of more than 957 000. To select markets, we conducted a cluster analysis in each of 6 US census geographic regions based on population size; population ethnic and religious composition; average income; annual state consumption of beer, wine, and liquor; state laws prohibiting sales of beer and liquor for off-premise consumption from restaurants, bars, grocery stores, gas stations, or drugstores; and percentage of households with cable television. 33 - 35 Markets were sampled from the identified clusters so that each geographic region in the sample was proportional to the number of top 75 markets within the region. Priority was given to markets with industry data on radio and billboard advertising, but otherwise selection was random. The selected 24 markets in the aggregate were not statistically different from the markets not selected on any of the measured criteria.

Households within markets were systematically sampled from a list of randomly selected households with telephones in the selected markets. 36 The list was purchased from Genesys Sampling Systems. 37 Within a household, the youth with the most recent birthday was selected. The mean ± SD response rate across markets at baseline was 27% ± 12%, and the refusal rate was 24% ± 7%, with many households of unknown eligibility not reached after 20 callbacks. 38 The sample sizes per wave were 1872, 1173, 787, and 588. The mobility of the 18- to 26-year-old segment of the population contributed greatly to sample attrition. Only 19% of the attrition at the second interview was due to a refusal to participate, compared with 68% due to disconnected numbers or respondent no longer in residence. Compared with youth who remained in the sample, youth who dropped out by the fourth interview were slightly older (20.2 vs 19.7 years), less likely to have been in high school (27.6% vs 42.3%), less likely to have been living at home (58.8% vs 70.7%), and drank more alcohol as of baseline (23.6 drinks per month vs14.9 drinks per month). Having greater attrition among drinkers is similar to other longitudinal youth alcohol use studies. 39 To minimize the effects of sampling and attrition, participants contributed as much data as was collected for them in the analysis (no cases were dropped), and the variables related to attrition were controlled statistically in the analyses.

The data were weighted at baseline by age, gender, and market to reflect the US population aged 15 to 26 years in the top 75 media markets. Weighting to a known population distribution adjusts for sampling fluctuations, nonresponse, and noncoverage. 36 The weighted data produced similar coefficients to the unweighted analyses.

The study received approval from the University of Connecticut institutional review board. Study participants and the parents of study participants younger than 18 years gave their oral consent before the baseline interview.

Outcome measure

Respondents were asked 3 questions about alcohol use: “On how many days did you drink any alcoholic beverage in the past 4 weeks” (frequency), “When you drank alcohol, how many drinks, glasses, bottles, or cans did you have per day, on average” (average quantity), and “What is the maximum number of alcoholic drinks, glasses, bottles, or cans you had on one occasion” (maximum quantity). Alcohol use was computed by multiplying drinking frequency by the mean of the average and maximum quantity of drinking. For example, if a respondent reported drinking 5 times in the past month, having 2 drinks on average, and a maximum quantity on one occasion of 4, we multiplied 5 by (2 + 4)/2 for a final score of 15. Thus, the measure estimated the number of alcoholic drinks consumed in the past month.

Advertising measures

Advertising exposure was measured using 2 questions that assessed self-reported beer or liquor and premixed drink (eg, Smirnoff Ice) advertising exposure in the past month on each of 4 media (television, radio, magazines, and billboards) for a total of 8 items. The 8 items were summed to make an index. The question format was, “How many times in the past 4 weeks have you seen (media) ads for (beer/liquor or premixed drinks)?” To standardize across response formats on different surveys, “none” was coded as 0, “a few” and responses of 1 to 3 were coded as 2, “some” and responses of 4 to 6 were coded as 5, and “many” and responses of 7 or greater were coded as 10. (Ten was the modal response for the continuous response format for answers of 7 or greater.)

Market alcohol advertising expenditures per capita

Industry data on the amount spent on alcohol advertisements (in thousands) on television, radio, newspaper, and outdoors (mostly billboards) in each market in 1999 and 2000 were purchased from TNS Media Intelligence (formerly, Competitive Media Reporting). 40 The figure was divided by the market adult population size 33 to create an expenditures-per-capita index.

Other measures

Data collection took place for several months for each wave. Time of the interview per individual and per wave was measured as the number of months past the start of the study (April 1999) that the interview took place. Thus, for someone interviewed in December 1999, the time was 8 months.

Alcohol sales per capita

The total number of beer, wine, and liquor cases (in hundreds) sold per 1000 adults in each state in 2000 was purchased from an industry source. 41 It is important to control for total alcohol consumption levels because markets with greater sales may attract more alcohol advertising from brands competing to sell in markets with more heavy drinkers. In addition, adults who consume more on average may have an influence on youth drinking through tolerant attitudes and modeling. It is estimated that four fifths of all alcoholic beverages are consumed by adults. 5

Demographics

Age was an individual’s age in years beyond 15 years measured at baseline. Other demographic variables included the dummy variables of female, gender, current school status (in high school, in college, or not in school), and ethnicity (African American, Hispanic, or neither).

Statistical analysis

We used multilevel modeling to handle the complex sample and repeated-measures design. 42 There were 3 levels of analysis: (1) 4418 observations, accounting for the repeated measures within individuals, (2) 1858 individuals, and (3) 24 markets. The software used was HLM 6.01. 43 Because the outcome variable was count data (number of drinks) with many zeros (nondrinkers), we conducted nonlinear analysis using a Poisson sampling model with a log-link function. 42 , 44 - 46 The weights were applied at level 2. Analysis of the unconditional model showed that the largest share of the variance in alcohol use was within individuals (81%), reinforcing the importance of examining alcohol use within individuals.

We modeled growth in drinking over time by including month of interview in the model at level 1. 47 Since youth often increase their drinking as they age, we allowed growth to vary by age by including an interaction term between time and age.

The model examined the impact on alcohol use of alcohol advertising at the 3 levels: differences within individuals over time in advertising exposure, differences between individuals in advertising exposure, and market-level advertising expenditures. Alcohol advertising exposure at level 1 was centered on the individual’s mean alcohol advertising exposure across all observations. Centering around an individual’s mean is recommended when the aggregate of the level 1 predictors has a separate and distinct relationship with the outcome variable compared with variations within an individual. 42 , 45 , 47 The individual’s mean advertising exposure was added as an independent variable at level 2, and market-level advertising expenditures were added at level 3. We added an interaction term between time and age and market advertising expenditures to test for differential growth in drinking over time by differences in market advertising expenditures and as youth age.

The model controlled for several potential confounders, including gender, age, ethnicity, and school status, all of which are known to vary with alcohol use. 48 Since school status could vary over time, 2 dummy variables for school status (high school, college, and no school) were entered at level 1. Another potential confounder, alcohol sales per capita, was entered at level 3. Alcohol sales, market advertising expenditures, time, and age were centered around the grand mean to aid in interpretation of the coefficients. Centering is particularly useful when dealing with interaction terms. 49 Error terms were included for all variables at level 3. Among the level 1 variables, the intercept and time were allowed to randomly vary. (If more than 2 factors were treated as randomly varying, the model would not converge.) The model tested was as follows:

η = γ 000 + γ 001 (Alcohol Sales per Capita) + γ 002 (Market Advertising Expenditures per Capita) + γ 010 (Female) + γ 020 (Age) + γ 030 (Black) + γ 040 (Hispanic) + γ 050 (Mean Advertising Exposure) + γ 100 (Time) + γ 110 (Time·Age) + γ 101 (Time·Age·Market Advertising Expenditures per Capita) + γ 200 (Advertising Exposure, Within Individual) + γ 300 (High School) + γ 400 (College) + r 0 + r 1 (Time) + u 00 + u 01 (Female) + u 02 (Age) + u 03 (Black) + u 04 (Hispanic) + u 05 (Mean Advertising Exposure) + u 10 (Time) + u 11 (Time·Age) + u 20 (Advertising Exposure, Within Individual) + u 30 (High School) + u 40 (College) + e

where η is the log-link function for drinking, γ is the estimated coefficient, e is the level 1 (observation) random effect, r is the level 2 (individual) random effect, and u is the level 3 (market-level) random effect.

The analysis was repeated for the subset of the sample younger than 21 years because of the importance of underage drinking. The sample sizes were 2286 at level 1, 1094 at level 2, and 24 at level 3. The intercept was the only random factor among the level 1 variables. The results show the unit-specific models and the event rate ratios. The event rate ratio, which for a Poisson model is the exponential of a coefficient, can be interpreted as the percentage change in the dependent variable associated with an increase of 1 unit in the independent variable, holding other factors constant. 42

Sixty-one percent of the sample had at least 1 drink in the past month at baseline ( Table 1 ). Drinkers consumed 38.5 total drinks on average in the past month at baseline (95% confidence interval [CI], 34.3-42.7), imbibing an average of 4.5 drinks per episode (95% CI, 4.3-4.8). Drinkers younger than 21 years had 29 drinks on average at baseline, with 4.5 drinks on average each drinking session (95% CI, 4.1-4.8). The market alcohol advertising spending ranged from $78 000 (Tulsa, Okla) to $88 750 000 (Los Angeles, Calif) during 1999 and 2000, with a mean of $14 800 000 worth of alcohol advertising (95% CI, $13 800 000-$15 800 000). Per capita spending ranged from $0.20 to $17.3, averaging $6.8 (95% CI, 6.6-7.0). Individuals reported seeing an average of 22.7 alcohol advertisements per month at baseline.

The results in Table 2 show that advertising exposure was positively related to an increase in drinking. Holding other factors constant, individuals who saw 1 more advertisement average than other individuals had 1% more alcoholic drinks per month (event rate ratio, 1.01; 95% CI, 1.01-1.02). Within-individual variation in advertising exposure was not a statistically significant factor in drinking, so whether a youth saw more or fewer advertisements in a particular month than he or she typically saw was not as important a determinant of drinking as that person’s average level of advertising exposure over time.

Market advertising expenditures per capita were related to drinking levels and to growth in drinking over time. For every additional dollar per capita spent on advertising in the market, individuals consumed 3% more alcoholic beverages per month (event rate ratio, 1.03; 95% CI, 1.01-1.05), holding constant other factors, including time. There was an interaction effect between time and age and market advertising expenditures. In markets with high levels of advertising expenditures per capita, growth in drinking over time is steepest among older youth, reaching close to 50 drinks a month for 25-year-olds ( Figure 1 ). In markets with low levels of advertising expenditures per capita, the initial drinking rates were lower than in markets with high levels of advertising expenditures per capita ( Figure 2 ). Younger age groups show an increase in drinking over time but at a slower rate than peers in markets with high levels of advertising expenditures per capita. Around the age of 22 years, growth flattens out, with little increase in drinking over time. Above age 23 years, drinking declines over time in the markets with low levels of advertising expenditures per capita, declining most steeply in older age groups. (The figures depict growth curves, assuming mean levels of continuous factors and zero values for dummy variables, including male, not in school, not black, and not Hispanic.)

Alcohol use over time by age in markets with high alcohol advertising expenditures per capita.

Alcohol use over time by age in markets with low alcohol advertising expenditures per capita.

To better illustrate the effects of the main variables of interest, Figure 3 depicts the relationship among alcohol use, mean levels of advertising exposure, advertising expenditures per capita, and gender. We held constant the other factors in the model; therefore, the figure shows predicted drinking levels for a 20-year-old who is not currently a student, neither African American nor Hispanic, and living in a market with an average amount of alcohol sales per capita measured at the mean date of the study and who reported, in the prior month, exposure to his or her average number of advertisements. The results indicate that a 20-year-old man who saw few alcohol advertisements (5) and lived in a market with minimal alcohol advertising expenditures per capita was predicted to have 9 alcoholic drinks in the past month compared with 16 drinks if he saw many advertisements (45). A man with the same profile but living in a market with the highest advertising spending per capita was predicted to have 15 drinks if he reported little advertising exposure and 26 drinks if he saw many advertisements.

Alcohol use by mean advertising exposure, market advertising expenditures per capita, and gender.

We tested the same hierarchical linear model for the subset of the sample younger than the legal drinking age. The results were similar to those for the sample as a whole. Drinking was greater among underage youth who reported higher mean levels of alcohol advertising exposure ( Table 3 ). Each additional average advertisement exposure was associated with an increase of 1% in drinks consumed in the past month (event rate ratio, 1.01; 95% CI, 1.001-1.021), holding constant other factors. Drinking levels were higher among underage youth living in markets with greater per capita advertising expenditures (event rate ratio, 1.03; 95% CI, 1.00-1.06), holding constant other factors. A 3-way interaction effect still occurred among time, age, and market advertising expenditures, following similar growth curves to those in Figure 1 and Figure 2 .

The results of the present large-scale national longitudinal study provide evidence that the amount of advertising expenditures in 15- to 26-year-olds’ media environment and the amount of advertising recalled related to greater youth drinking. Youth younger than the legal drinking age displayed a similar pattern of advertising effects as the entire age range, which is important because there is often a greater policy interest in protecting underage youth from harmful communications than in protecting youth older than 21 years.

Greater alcohol advertising expenditures in a market were related to both greater levels of youth drinking and steeper increases in drinking over time. Youth who lived in markets with more alcohol advertising drank more, increased their drinking levels more over time, and continued to increase drinking levels into their late 20s. Youth who lived in markets with less alcohol advertising drank less and showed a pattern of increasing their drinking modestly until their early 20s, when their drinking levels started to decline. The results are consistent with findings from studies of advertising bans 31 , 32 and extend them by linking alcohol advertising expenditures per capita directly with individual youth behavior. The effect of market advertising spending on youth drinking was not attributable to differences in alcohol sales, which was controlled for statistically in the model.

The relationship between market-level advertising expenditures and youth drinking is all the more striking because it assesses the effect of the “added value” of advertising in a market, over and above national advertisements appearing in all markets. Of the more than $1 billion a year spent on alcohol advertising at the time of the study, approximately one fifth was placed on local television, radio, and billboards. 50 To the extent that additional communication produces diminishing returns, the added value of market-level advertising may underestimate the total effect of alcohol advertising.

The results are consistent with theories of cumulative effects of media exposure. Youth reporting greater amounts of exposure to alcohol advertising over the long term drank more than youth who saw fewer ads. Alcohol consumption was less sensitive to short-term differences in alcohol advertising exposure than to the long-term effects of exposure.

Given that there was an impact on drinking using an objective measure of advertising expenditures, the results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that a correlation between advertising exposure and drinking could be caused entirely by selective attention on the part of drinkers. The results also contradict claims that advertising is unrelated to youth drinking amounts: that advertising at best causes brand switching, only affects those older than the legal drinking age, or is effectively countered by current educational efforts. Alcohol advertising was a contributing factor to youth drinking quantities over time.

The strength of the study was the relatively large national sample, the use of an objective measure of advertising expenditures to complement the subjective measure of advertising exposure, and the matching of expenditure data with individual behavior. The study was limited by the industry data used to measure advertising exposure, which largely reflects the most expensive medium for advertising—television. During this period, data on outdoor advertising was spotty and may have been incomplete in some markets. It is also possible that using a measure of likely advertising exposures (such as gross rating points) would increase effects. There may also be variation in the national advertising expenditures in markets, through differences in cable systems and presence of national stations or programming, that were not measured. Note, too, that other forms of marketing were not included here (such as product placements in programming, promotions, sports sponsorships, and stadium advertising) that could affect youth drinking. Future research could examine the impact of different forms of advertising and the consumption of various alcoholic products. Other limitations of the study were the sample attrition and the fact that those who drank more at baseline were more likely to drop out of the study. Future research should also control for the effects of parent and peer influences on drinking. Finally, the study does not explain the process by which advertising affects youth.

Correspondence: Leslie B. Snyder, PhD, Department of Communication Sciences, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-1085 ( [email protected] ).

Accepted for Publication: September 12, 2005.

Author Contributions: Leslie B. Snyder, PhD, had full access to all the data in the study and takes responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.

Funding/Support: This study was funded by grant 1R01AA11551 from the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Bethesda, Md, to Dr Snyder.

Acknowledgment: David Kenny, PhD, Kimberly Henry, PhD, Ann O’Connell, PhD, and Cyr Emile M’Lan, PhD, reviewed the analysis and results. William Wells, PhD, Mark Hamilton, PhD, Dwayne Proctor, PhD, and Elizabeth Mitchell, PhD, contributed to the survey design. Data collection was performed by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut.

See More About

Snyder LB , Milici FF , Slater M , Sun H , Strizhakova Y. Effects of Alcohol Advertising Exposure on Drinking Among Youth. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2006;160(1):18–24. doi:10.1001/archpedi.160.1.18

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OPINION article

Analyzing large-scale studies: benefits and challenges.

• 1 Department of Human Sciences, Learning and Teaching With Media, Institute for Education, Universität der Bundeswehr München, Neubiberg, Germany
• 2 Department of Human Sciences, Methodology in the Social Sciences, Institute for Education, Universität der Bundeswehr München, Neubiberg, Germany
• 3 Center for International Student Assessment, TUM School of Education, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany

Introduction

The analysis of (inter)national large-scale assessments (LSAs) promises representativity of their results and statistical power and has the ability to reveal even minor effects. LSAs' international grounding verifies previous findings that might previously have been biased by their focus on Western and industrialized countries. This contribution will discuss these promises, contextualizing them via methodical challenges and interpretation caveats that are able to tap the potential of LSAs for educational psychology. Evidence of this contribution is grounded in previous analyses of Program for International Student Assessment (PISA; Schleicher, 2019 ) and Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies ( PIAAC; OECD, 2013 ), two internationally repeated cross-sectional studies. Many aspects we bring up can also apply to several other international large-scale studies, such as TIMSS, PIRLS, and ICILS. 1 We also refer to the national longitudinal study German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS; Blossfeld et al., 2011 ) to include a perspective on longitudinal studies in this paper. Implications for large-scale studies within the context of learning and teaching round off our paper in its closing section.

Representativity and Impact

LSAs aim to survey representative (sub)samples of defined populations (e.g., OECD, 2013 , section Caveats). This representativity can help them be more informative and provide stronger evidence for policymaking than traditional educational or psychological studies that often rely on convenience samples. Wagemaker (2014) discusses changes in educational policies as one of LSAs' impacts. Fischman et al. (2019) looked deeper inside the issue of LSAs' direct impact on educational policy, finding that several countries worldwide have established PISA-based educational goals (p. 12). They further report that LSA results are often used as triggers or levers for educational reforms, while also showing that several stakeholders mentioned that these kinds of studies actually hinder reforms when their focus is too much on simply reaching the stated indicators (see Rutkowski and Rutkowski, 2018 ).

Longitudinal Perspective

A second LSA benefit is their long-time perspective. They either have been repeated cross-sectionally in several cycles (e.g., the PISA study takes place every 3 years; Schleicher, 2019 ) or show a longitudinal panel design, such as with NEPS that recently surveyed six starting cohorts in Germany over the past 10 years ( Blossfeld and Roßbach, 2019 ). While the trend-study approach of PISA allows a measurement of how changes in educational policy or society may impact a defined sample (e.g., 15-year-old students in PISA; Schleicher, 2019 ), the longitudinal approach of NEPS enables background variables to be revealed, shedding light on how an individual's characteristics affect educational trajectories ( Blossfeld and Roßbach, 2019 ). These procedures can be especially informative if a study like NEPS follows several cohorts that overlap at a certain point in time.

Standardization

Besides representativity and the longitudinal perspective, LSAs provide standardized procedures, instruments, item pools, and test booklets (e.g., OECD, 2013 ). These standardizations ensure a survey setting and data that allow international comparisons (PIAAC and PISA) as well as comparisons between survey cycles (PIAAC and PISA) or waves (NEPS). An essential prerequisite for supporting these comparisons is the international cooperation for developing competency and performance measures as well as questionnaires (see, e.g., OECD, 2013 ). Furthermore, the standardized coding of survey data allows a certain level of matching to contextual and/or official data, e.g., labor market data, national examination statistics, or even geodata from microcom in NEPS ( Schönberger and Koberg, 2018 ). 2

Statistical Power

Finally, the large sample sizes with LSAs provide a statistical power for analyses that allows detection on the individual level of even small effects, even if subsamples of the original population are analyzed. This helps to reveal effects that would have been overlooked in traditional educational or psychological studies. However, statistical power here decreases when analyses go beyond the individual level and focus on class, school, or national realms.

Complexity of Analysis

These promises go along with analysis and interpretation challenges. The advantage of representativity in the context of economic sample sizes requires a complex weighting of each case. Consequently, all further analyses must include weights to be able to maintain representativity during analyses. Using stratification variables for sampling that differ across the participating countries to reflect different (educational) structures in their population requires complex variance estimation procedures. This is typically based on replicated estimation or bootstrap procedures ( Rust, 1985 ; Lin et al., 2013 ) to prove significance statements. In addition, the principle of item sampling (e.g., Lord, 1965 ) typically used in competence assessment (see Rutkowski et al., 2013 ) results in design-related missing data points (see below), which are compensated by the plausible value (PV) techniques (e.g., von Davier et al., 2009 ; von Davier, 2013 , and Marsman et al., 2016 ). Here, analysis procedures have to take not only one but also multiple (e.g., five, ten, or even more) variables (PV) as competence measures into account. However, these kinds of procedures are rare with traditional statistics programs, 3 meaning representative analyses need either add-ons such as the IDB Analyzer 4 or specifically developed packages for R (e.g., survey; BIFIEsurvey, or intsvy; see Heine and Reiss, 2019 ).

Another aspect relates to the extent of the questionnaires. People being surveyed can offer only a limited amount of time. This is typically compensated for in LSAs via two alternative approaches. A pragmatic and easily implemented approach is to apply very short scales for measuring traits and competencies. The NEPS panel, for example, measures the Big Five 5 personality domains with only two items per dimension and vocational interests (the Big Six) with three items per dimension (see Wohlkinger et al., 2011 ). The issue of expectably low reliabilities and the respective validity is increasingly being discussed in psychological research ( Rammstedt and Beierlein, 2014 ). A more demanding approach in terms of both implementation and later analysis is to use rotated booklet designs (e.g., Frey et al., 2009 and Heine et al., 2016 ). For computer-based assessments, adaptive test scenarios can usually further reduce the number of items (e.g., Kubinger, 2017 ). In both test designs, the items are appropriately distributed across different test booklets or even test scenarios. Test takers here often do not answer every item, which inevitably results in missing data points. With a suitable test design, this loss of data is typically completely random, although it still might require the use of data imputation methods which can be complicated to apply. 6

Missing Data and Imputation

Correspondingly, for the construction of short scales or within-scale 7 booklet designs, LSAs often require general design decisions for the assessment of competencies. The NEPS data set for instance surveyed competencies for only about a third of the student cohort ( FDZ-LIfBi, 2018 ), while PIAAC assessed the competency of problem solving in technology-rich environments just for parts of the sample ( OECD, 2013 ) with the booklet designs described above. This means that there is no discrete competency value for an individual; the estimate for competency is based on PVs (e.g., von Davier et al., 2009 ), which are based on the theory of data imputation (see Rubin, 1987 ). Modeling longitudinal effects, e.g., by structural equation modeling, furthermore requires the availability of the target variables at specific waves in order to construct valid models.

Invariance of Measurement

A recent OECD conference related to cross-country comparability of questionnaire scales (see Avvisati et al., 2019 ) identified measurement invariance as a core challenge for LSAs in general and for PISA studies as well ( Van de Vijver et al., 2019 ). Among other methodological topics, participants from different countries discussed typical forms of analysis for verification of measurement invariance. A classical approach for the verification of the measurement invariance uses multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA). Based on this, a widely accepted taxonomy includes configurational, metric, scalar, and residual measurement invariance (e.g., Putnick and Bornstein, 2016 ). The MGCFA approach however also has critical aspects ranging from insufficient subgroup sizes (even for LSA data), reduced test strength, and unknown distribution properties of the test statistics—especially when global model validation tests are used to assess the relative model fit of varyingly nested MGCFA models for levels of measurement invariance. Moreover, MGCFA rests on the assumption of a continuous scale for both the latent variable of interest and the response scales of the manifest indicators. When these strong assumptions of interval scales can be seriously questioned, different models from the IRT domain can be used for ordinal scales or methodology for classification like (multigroup) latent class analysis (MG-LCA— Eid et al., 2003 and Eid, 2019 ) for nominal scales. Some recent approaches in the LSA framework are founded upon Bayesian IRT models (e.g., Fox, 2010 ) or IRT residual fit statistics (see, e.g., Buchholz and Hartig, 2017 ). To establish an invariant scale on the item level, there are in fact some promising approaches to automated item selection to determine a scale, which fulfill predefined target criteria such as invariance across subsamples and cultures (e.g., Schultze and Eid, 2018 ).

Item Formats and Response Sets

Extreme and middle response endorsement, cheating, socially desirable responding, and flat-lined response behavior are phenomena closely related to the issue of invariant measurement (see Heine, 2020 ). A critical discussion is currently taking place regarding whether innovative item formats ( Kyllonen, 2013 ) such as forced choice measures (e.g., Bürkner et al., 2019 ) or anchoring vignettes to adjust distorted responses (e.g., Stankov et al., 2018 ) might lead to improved measurement when compared to classical rating scales.

Classification Issues and Different Standards

Standardization and international comparability require the classification of responses, e.g., of vocational aspirations, by standardized classification schemes such as the ISCO-08. However, standardization is always subject to national practice and legislation, and although these schemes are in fact well-defined, they usually do not unambiguously map in alignment with national peculiarities; i.e., they often are only able to partially map national differences. Nursing is widely discussed as a prototypical challenge when it comes to international classification issues (see, e.g., Baumann, 2013 and Palmer and Miles, 2019 ) because it is distinguished with respect to the educational path (vocational vs. university background) as well as in terms of the scope of medical treatment a nurse is allowed to perform (see, e.g., Currie and Carr-Hill, 2013 and Gunn et al., 2019 ).

Significance Does Not Mean Big Effects

Along with these challenges, LSAs also provide some interpretation caveats. The high sample sizes of large-scale studies support big statistical power (on the level of the individual) as a result frequent significance levels of p < 0.001 (or lower). Although this is strong when it comes to detecting even marginal differences, it also allows marginal effect sizes (zero effects) to become significant. So merely showing the significance of differences is not sufficient (e.g., Cohen, 1994 and Hunter, 1997 ) when analyzing large-scale studies; it is necessary to additionally discuss effect sizes (e.g., Snyder and Lawson, 1993 ).

Horse Race Communication

Countries and states participating in international large-scale studies differ in both their schooling systems and general societal aspects. Just one example of this involves socioeconomic background variables and basic political and social convictions. Different immigration policies in different countries (see, e.g., Entorf and Minoiu, 2005 and Hunger and Krannich, 2015 ) can lead to a different population composition in so-called “non-native speaker groups,” or groups of people with low socioeconomic status might in turn influence (bias) the outcomes of these studies in cross-country comparisons much more than the factor of different school systems. Many international large-scale studies have very complex designs and analyses, and as a result, local or national aspects might be the most illustrative ones to communicate, even if they are not the most relevant ones when considering other educational factors. This often leads to a horse race discussion focusing on the position rather than on the peculiarities of the respective systems. While Rutkowski and Rutkowski (2018) describe how to deal with these peculiarities, the NEPS data use agreement prohibits comparisons between the German federal states 8 to avoid precisely these issues.

Implications for Learning and Teaching

We have discussed the promises, challenges, and caveats of LSAs. Benefits such as representativity and the long-time perspective go along with challenges such as the complexity of analysis and limited information (e.g., information loss due to classification issues, missing values, constructs not covered, and panel loss) as well as with further caveats for interpretation. This reflects a general issue of these studies, i.e., that their result might have the power to influence educational policies (see Fischman et al., 2019 ) while at the same time displaying difficulties in being appropriately communicated to teachers, principals, and policymakers due to their complexity. This makes it essential to communicate and transfer LSA evidence into practice in a manner that this is appropriate and understandable for a non-scientific audience, without trivializing its results.

The international perspective of many large-scale studies allows the stereotypes and preconditions that national studies cannot overcome to be reflected upon (see also Else-Quest et al., 2010 ). These include for example stereotyped gender differences in mathematics and science that in the Western world often favor boys—while PISA results on the other hand have disclosed that several countries show scores favoring girls in mathematics and an almost even distribution in science scores ( OECD, 2015 , p. 28f.). The study design thereby allows an analysis of the extent to which phenomena develop over time and between different countries, which is an essential aspect for evaluating changes in really any educational system. Incidentally, education always targets the development of individuals. So longitudinal follow-up surveys and analyses of cohorts may increase the benefits of these studies as they relate to learning and teaching.

To sum up, (inter)national large-scale studies can provide several benefits for research on learning and teaching in how they achieve a solid data set for investigating relevant effects. However, the formal comparability of study scores does not exactly reflect actual differences between states or educational systems without considering background variables and national social and educational specifics. Although these studies may mitigate the methodical shortcomings of traditional studies, especially the focus on Western white populations, they at the same time may reveal methodical challenges.

Author Contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.

Conceptual analyses resulting in this article were partially funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) - project ER470/2-1. The publication of this article was funded by the Open Access Fund of the Bundeswehr Universität München.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

1. ^ See, e.g., Lenkeit and Schwippert (2018) , Gustafsson (2018) , von Maurice et al. (2017) , and Rutkowski et al. (2010) for an overview of international large-scale studies.

2. ^ Matching to contextual data is typically required to preserve the anonymity of individuals and schools. Here, different levels of anonymization, starting from a segment of households up to the municipality level, may be observable (see Schönberger and Koberg, 2018 ). This kind of matching is usually implemented by the provider of the data set and may require further data access restrictions, e.g., that access is granted only in rooms with specific security precautions. Microcom enrichment may be restricted in some countries and for some studies.

3. ^ Analyses would be supported by multilevel structural equation modeling, e.g., in MPLUS, if the correct weights are appropriately used and the plausible values are correctly applied. However, the usability of this modeling is dependent on the complexity of the data set and decreases dramatically when nested plausible values are used, for example.

4. ^ https://www.iea.nl/data-tools/tools

5. ^ The Big Five is a set of personality variables including the dimensions of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (see Goldberg, 1990 and McCrae and John, 1992 ).

6. ^ The use of rotated booklet designs and/or adaptive testing usually leads to the imputation of data by the provision of plausible values for estimating test results (see next section). This increases the complexity of analyses (as mentioned in the previous section).

7. ^ The within-scale booklet design is used to describe the phenomenon that all constructs or scales are represented in all booklets, albeit with different and a reduced number of items.

8. ^ https://www.neps-data.de/Portals/0/NEPS/Datenzentrum/Datenzugangswege/Vertraege/NEPS_DataUseAgreement_en.pdf

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Keywords: large-scale assessments, ILSA, PISA, PIAAC, NEPS, educational psychology, learning and teaching

Citation: Ertl B, Hartmann FG and Heine J-H (2020) Analyzing Large-Scale Studies: Benefits and Challenges. Front. Psychol. 11:577410. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.577410

Received: 29 June 2020; Accepted: 26 October 2020; Published: 09 December 2020.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2020 Ertl, Hartmann and Heine. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Bernhard Ertl, bernhard.ertl@unibw.de

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History of Advertising

Advertising is defined as promoting a product or service through the use of paid announcements (Dictionary). These announcements have had an enormous effect on modern culture, and thus deserve a great deal of attention in any treatment of the media’s influence on culture.

Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 3.0; Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 3.0; Wikimedia Commons – public domain; Vanguard Visions – Search Engine Online Advertising – CC BY 2.0.

Early Advertising

Advertising dates back to ancient Rome’s public markets and forums and continues into the modern era in most homes around the world. Contemporary consumers relate to and identify with brands and products. Advertising has inspired an independent press and conspired to encourage carcinogenic addictions. An exceedingly human invention, advertising is an unavoidable aspect of the shared modern experience.

In 79 CE, the eruption of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius destroyed and, ultimately, preserved the ancient city of Pompeii. Historians have used the city’s archaeological evidence to piece together many aspects of ancient life. Pompeii’s ruins reveal a world in which the fundamental tenets of commerce and advertising were already in place. Merchants offered different brands of fish sauces identified by various names such as “Scaurus’ tunny jelly.” Wines were branded as well, and their manufacturers sought to position them by making claims about their prestige and quality. Toys and other merchandise found in the city bear the names of famous athletes, providing, perhaps, the first example of endorsement techniques (Hood, 2005).

The invention of the printing press in 1440 made it possible to print advertisements that could be put up on walls and handed out to individuals. By the 1600s, newspapers had begun to include advertisements on their pages. Advertising revenue allowed newspapers to print independently of secular or clerical authority, eventually achieving daily circulation. By the end of the 16th century, most newspapers contained at least some advertisements (O’Barr, 2005).

European colonization of the Americas during the 1600s brought about one of the first large-scale advertising campaigns. When European trading companies realized that the Americas held economic potential as a source of natural resources such as timber, fur, and tobacco, they attempted to convince others to cross the Atlantic Ocean and work to harvest this bounty. The advertisements for this venture described a paradise without beggars and with plenty of land for those who made the trip. The advertisements convinced many poor Europeans to become indentured servants to pay for the voyage (Mierau, 2000).

Nineteenth-Century Roots of Modern Advertising

The rise of the penny press during the 1800s had a profound effect on advertising. The New York Sun embraced a novel advertising model in 1833 that allowed it to sell issues of the paper for a trifling amount of money, ensuring a higher circulation and a wider audience. This larger audience in turn justified greater prices for advertisements, allowing the paper to make a profit from its ads rather than from direct sales (Vance).

Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

In 1843, a salesman named Volney Palmer founded the first U.S. advertising agency in Philadelphia. The agency made money by linking potential advertisers with newspapers. By 1867, other agencies had formed, and advertisements were being marketed at the national level. During this time, George Rowell, who made a living buying bulk advertising space in newspapers to subdivide and sell to advertisers, began conducting market research in its modern recognizable form. He used surveys and circulation counts to estimate numbers of readers and anticipate effective advertising techniques. His agency gained an advantage over other agencies by offering advertising space most suited for a particular product. This trend quickly caught on with other agencies. In 1888, Rowell started the first advertising trade magazine, Printers’ Ink (Gartrell).

McClure’s had success in 1893 thanks to an advertising model: selling issues for nearly half the price of other magazines and depending on advertising revenues to make up the difference between cost and sales price. Magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal focused on specific audiences, so they allowed advertisers to market products designed for a specific demographic. By 1900, Harper’s Weekly , once known for refusing advertising, featured ads on half of its pages (All Classic Ads).

P. T. Barnum and Advertising

The career of P. T. Barnum, cofounder of the famed Barnum & Bailey circus, gives a sense of the uncontrolled nature of advertising during the 1800s. He began his career in the 1840s writing ads for a theater, and soon after, he began promoting his own shows. He advertised these shows any way he could, using not only interesting newspaper ads but also bands of musicians, paintings on the outside of his buildings, and street-spanning banners.

Barnum also learned the effectiveness of using the media to gain attention. In an early publicity stunt, Barnum hired a man to wordlessly stack bricks at various corners near his museum during the hours preceding a show. When this activity drew a crowd, the man went to the museum and bought a ticket for the show. This stunt drew such large crowds over the next 2 days, that the police made Barnum put a halt to it, gaining it even wider media attention. Barnum was sued for fraud over a bearded woman featured in one of his shows; the plaintiffs claimed that she was, in fact, a man. Rather than trying to keep the trial quiet, Barnum drew attention to it by parading a crowd of witnesses attesting to the bearded woman’s gender, drawing more media attention—and more customers.

trialsanderrors – The marvelous foot-ball dogs, poster for Barnum & Bailey, 1900 – CC BY 2.0.

Barnum aimed to make his audience think about what they had seen for an extended time. His Feejee mermaid—actually a mummified monkey and fish sewn together—was not necessarily interesting because viewers thought the creation was really a mermaid, but because they weren’t sure if it was or not. Such marketing tactics brought Barnum’s shows out of his establishments and into social conversations and newspapers (Applegate, 1998). Although most companies today would eschew Barnum’s outrageous style, many have used the media and a similar sense of mystery to promote their products. Apple, for example, famously keeps its products such as the iPhone and iPad under wraps, building media anticipation and coverage.

Another ubiquitous aspect of advertising developed around this time: brands. During most of the 19th century, consumers purchased goods in bulk, weighing out scoops of flour or sugar from large store barrels and paying for them by the pound. Innovations in industrial packaging allowed companies to mass produce bags, tins, and cartons with brand names on them. Although brands existed before this time, they were generally reserved for goods that were inherently recognizable, such as china or furniture. Advertising a particular kind of honey or flour made it possible for customers to ask for that product by name, giving it an edge over the unnamed competition. 1

In the early 1900s, brand-name food items, such as this one, began making a household name for themselves.

Stuart Rankin – Payn’s Sure-Raising Flour – CC BY-NC 2.0.

Advertising Gains Stature During the 20th Century

Although advertising was becoming increasingly accepted as an element of mass media, many still regarded it as an unseemly occupation. This attitude began to change during the early 20th century. As magazines—widely considered a highbrow medium—began using more advertising, the advertising profession began attracting more artists and writers. Writers used verse and artists produced illustrations to embellish advertisements. Not surprisingly, this era gave rise to commercial jingles and iconic brand characters such as the Jolly Green Giant and the Pillsbury Doughboy.

The household cleaner Sapolio produced advertisements that made the most of the artistic advertising trend. Sapolio’s ads featured various drawings of the residents of “Spotless Town” along with a rhymed verse celebrating the virtues of this fictional haven of cleanliness. The public anticipated each new ad in much the same way people today anticipate new TV episodes. In fact, the ads became so popular that citizens passed “Spotless Town” resolutions to clean up their own jurisdictions. Advertising trends later moved away from flowery writing and artistry, but the lessons of those memorable campaigns continued to influence the advertising profession for years to come (Fox, 1984).

World War I fueled an advertising and propaganda boom. Corporations that had switched to manufacturing wartime goods wanted to stay in the public eye by advertising their patriotism. Equally, the government needed to encourage public support for the war, employing such techniques as the famous Uncle Sam recruiting poster. President Woodrow Wilson established the advertiser-run Committee on Public Information to make movies and posters, write speeches, and generally sell the war to the public. Advertising helped popularize World War I on the home front, and the war in turn gave advertising a much-needed boost in stature. The postwar return to regular manufacturing initiated the 1920s as an era of unprecedented advertising. 3 The rising film industry made celebrity testimonials, or product endorsements , an important aspect of advertising during the 1920s. Film stars including Clara Bow and Joan Crawford endorsed products such as Lux toilet soap. In these early days of mass-media consumer culture, film actors and actresses gave the public figures to emulate as they began participating in popular culture. 4

Radio became an accepted commercial medium during the 1920s. Although many initially thought radio was too intrusive a medium to allow advertising, as it entered people’s homes by the end of the decade, advertising had become an integral aspect of programming. Advertising agencies often created their own programs that networks then distributed. As advertisers conducted surveys and researched prime time slots, radio programming changed to appeal to their target demographics. The famous Lux Radio Theater , for example, was named for and sponsored by a brand of soap. Product placement was an important part of these early radio programs. Ads for Jell-O appeared during the course of the Jack Benny Show (JackBennyShow.com), and Fibber McGee and Molly scripts often involved their sponsor’s floor wax (Burgan, 1996). The relationship between a sponsor and a show’s producers was not always harmonious; the producers of radio programs were constrained from broadcasting any content that might reflect badly on their sponsor.

The Great Depression and Backlash

Unsurprisingly, the Great Depression, with its widespread decreases in levels of income and buying power, had a negative effect on advertising. Spending on ads dropped to a mere 38 percent of its previous level. Social reformers added to revenue woes by again questioning the moral standing of the advertising profession. Books such as Through Many Windows and Our Master’s Voice portrayed advertisers as dishonest and cynical, willing to say anything to make a profit and unconcerned about their influence on society. Humorists also questioned advertising’s authority. The Depression-era magazine Ballyhoo regularly featured parodies of ads, similar to those seen later on Saturday Night Live or in The Onion . These ads mocked the claims that had been made throughout the 1920s, further reducing advertising’s public standing. 5

This advertising downturn lasted only as long as the Depression. As the United States entered World War II, advertising again returned to encourage public support and improve the image of businesses. 6 However, there was one lasting effect of the Depression. The rising consumer movement made false and misleading advertising a major public policy issue. At the time, companies such as Fleischmann’s (which claimed its yeast could cure crooked teeth) were using advertisements to pitch misleading assertions. Only business owners’ personal morals stood in the way of such claims until 1938, when the federal government created the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and gave it the authority to halt false advertising.

In 1955, TV outpaced all other media for advertising. TV provided advertisers with unique, geographically oriented mass markets that could be targeted with regionally appropriate ads (Samuel, 2006). The 1950s saw a 75 percent increase in advertising spending, faster than any other economic indicator at the time. 7

Single sponsors created early TV programs. These sponsors had total control over programs such as Goodyear TV Playhouse and Kraft Television Theatre . Some sponsors went as far as to manipulate various aspects of the programs. In one instance, a program run by the DeSoto car company asked a contestant to use a false name rather than his given name, Ford. The present-day network model of TV advertising took hold during the 1950s as the costs of TV production made sole sponsorship of a show prohibitive for most companies. Rather than having a single sponsor, the networks began producing their own shows, paying for them through ads sold to a number of different sponsors. 8 Under the new model of advertising, TV producers had much more creative control than they had under the sole-sponsorship model.

Advertising research during the 1950s had used scientifically driven techniques to attempt to influence consumer opinion. Although the effectiveness of this type of advertising is questionable, the idea of consumer manipulation through scientific methods became an issue for many Americans. Vance Packard’s best-selling 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders targeted this style of advertising. The Hidden Persuaders and other books like it were part of a growing critique of 1950s consumer culture. The U.S. public was becoming increasingly wary of advertising claims—not to mention increasingly weary of ads themselves. A few adventurous ad agencies used this consumer fatigue to usher in a new era of advertising and American culture (Frank, 1998).

The Creative Revolution

Burdened by association with Nazi Germany, where the company had originated, Volkswagen took a daring risk during the 1950s. In 1959, the Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) agency initiated an ad campaign for the company that targeted skeptics of contemporary culture. Using a frank personal tone with the audience and making fun of the planned obsolescence that was the hallmark of Detroit automakers, the campaign stood apart from other advertisements of the time. It used many of the consumer icons of the 1950s, such as suburbia and game shows, in a satirical way, pitting Volkswagen against mainstream conformity and placing it strongly on the side of the consumer. By the end of the 1960s, the campaign had become an icon of American anticonformity. In fact, it was such a success that other automakers quickly emulated it. Ads for the Dodge Fever, for example, mocked corporate values and championed rebellion. 9

This era of advertising became known as the creative revolution for its emphasis on creativity over straight salesmanship. The creative revolution reflected the values of the growing anticonformist movement that culminated in the countercultural revolution of the 1960s. The creativity and anticonformity of 1960s advertising quickly gave way to more product-oriented conventional ads during the 1970s. Agency conglomeration, a recession, and cultural fallout were all factors in the recycling of older ad techniques. Major TV networks dropped their long-standing ban on comparative advertising early in the decade, leading to a new trend in positioning ads that compared products. Advertising wars such as Coke versus Pepsi and, later, Microsoft versus Apple were products of this trend. 10

Innovations in the 1980s stemmed from a new TV channel: MTV. Producers of youth-oriented products created ads featuring music and focusing on stylistic effects, mirroring the look and feel of music videos. By the end of the decade, this style had extended to more mainstream products. Campaigns for the pain reliever Nuprin featured black-and-white footage with bright yellow pills, whereas ads for Michelob used grainy atmospheric effects (New York Times, 1989).

The Rise of Digital Media

Twenty-first-century advertising has adapted to new forms of digital media. Internet outlets such as blogs, social media forums, and other online spaces have created new possibilities for advertisers, and shifts in broadcasting toward Internet formats have threatened older forms of advertising. Video games, smartphones, and other technologies also present new possibilities. Specific new media advertising techniques will be covered in the next section.

Types of Advertising

Despite the rise of digital media, many types of traditional advertising have proven their enduring effectiveness. Local advertisers and large corporations continue to rely on billboards and direct-mail fliers. In 2009, Google initiated a billboard campaign for its Google Apps products that targeted business commuters. The billboards featured a different message every day for an entire month, using simple computer text messages portraying a fictitious executive learning about the product. Although this campaign was integrated with social media sites such as Twitter, its main thrust employed the basic billboard (Ionescu, 2009).

Danny Sullivan – Ask Versus Google In Billboards – CC BY 2.0.

Newspapers and Magazines

Although print ads have been around for centuries, Internet growth has hit newspaper advertising hard. Traditionally, newspapers have made money through commercial and classified advertising. Commercial advertisers, however, have moved to electronic media forms, and classified ad websites offer greater geographic coverage for free. The future of newspaper advertising—and of the newspaper industry as a whole—is up in the air.

Print magazines have suffered from many of the same difficulties as newspapers. Declining advertising revenue has contributed to the end of popular magazines such as Gourmet and to the introduction of new magazines that cross over into other media formats, such as Food Network Magazine . Until a new, effective model is developed, the future of magazine advertising will continue to be in doubt.

Compared to newspapers and magazines, radio’s advertising revenue has done well. Radio’s easy adaptation to new forms of communication has made it an easy sell to advertisers. Unlike newspapers, radio ads target specific consumers. Advertisers can also pay to have radio personalities read their ads live in the studio, adding a sense of personal endorsement to the business or product. Because newer forms of radio such as satellite and Internet stations have continued to use this model, the industry has not had as much trouble adapting as print media have.

TV advertisement relies on verbal as well as visual cues to sell items. Promotional ad time is purchased by the advertiser, and a spot usually runs 15 to 30 seconds. Longer ads, known as infomercials, run like a TV show and usually aim for direct viewer response. New technologies such as DVR allow TV watchers to skip through commercials; however, studies have shown that these technologies do not have a negative effect on advertising (Gallagher, 2010). This is partly due to product placement. Product placement is an important aspect of TV advertising, because it incorporates products into the plots of shows. Although product placement has been around since the 1890s, when the Lumière brothers first placed Lever soap in their movies, the big boom in product placement began with the reality TV show Survivor in 2000 (Anderson, 2006). Since then, product placement has been a staple of prime-time entertainment. Reality TV shows such as Project Runway and American Idol are known for exhibiting products on screen, and talk-show host Oprah Winfrey made news in 2004 when she gave away new Pontiacs to her audience members (Stansky, 2008). Even children’s shows are known to hock products; a cartoon series on Nickelodeon featured characters that represent different Sketchers sneakers (Freidman, 2010).

Digital Media

Emerging digital media platforms such as the Internet and mobile phones have created many new advertising possibilities. The Internet, like TV and radio, offers free services in exchange for advertising exposure. However, unlike radio or TV, the Internet is a highly personalized experience that shares private information.

Government Regulation of Advertising

Advertising regulation has played an important role in advertising’s history and cultural influence. One of the earliest federal laws addressing advertising was the Pure Food and Drug Law of 1906. A reaction to public outcry over the false claims of patent medicines, this law required informational labels to be placed on these products. It did not, however, address the questionable aspects of the advertisements, so it did not truly delve into the issue of false advertising. 12

The Formation of the FTC

Founded in 1914, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) became responsible for regulating false advertising claims. Although federal laws concerning these practices made plaintiffs prove that actual harm was done by the advertisement, state laws passed during the early 1920s allowed prosecution of misleading advertisements regardless of harm done. 13 The National Association of Attorneys General has helped states remain an important part of advertising regulation. In 1995, 13 states passed laws that required sweepstakes companies to provide full disclosure of rules and details of contests (O’Guinn, et. al., 2009).

During the Great Depression, New Deal legislation threatened to outlaw any misleading advertising, a result of the burgeoning consumer movement and the public outcry against advertising during the period (Time, 1941). The reformers did not fully achieve their goals, but they did make a permanent mark on advertising history. The 1938 Wheeler-Lea Amendment expanded the FTC’s role to protect consumers from deceptive advertising. Until this point, the FTC was responsible for addressing false advertising complaints from competitors. With this legislation, the agency also became an important resource for the consumer movement.

Truth in Advertising

In 1971, the FTC began the Advertising Substantiation Program to force advertisers to provide evidence for the claims in their advertisements. Under this program, the FTC gained the power to issue cease-and-desist orders to advertisers regarding specific ads in question and to order corrective advertising. Under this provision, the FTC can force a company to issue an advertisement acknowledging and correcting an earlier misleading ad. Regulations under this program established that supposed experts used in advertisements must be qualified experts in their field, and celebrities must actually use the products they endorse. 14 In 2006, Sunny Health Nutrition was brought to court for advertising height-enhancing pills called HeightMax. The FTC found the company had hired an actor to appear as an expert in its ads, and that the pills did not live up to their claim. Sunny Health Nutrition was forced to pay $375,000 to consumers for misrepresenting its product (Consumer Affairs, 2006).

In 1992, the FTC introduced guidelines defining terms such as biodegradable and recyclable . The growth of the environmental movement in the early 1990s led to an upsurge in environmental claims by manufacturers and advertisers. For example, Mobil Oil claimed their Hefty trash bags were biodegradable. While technically this statement is true, a 500- to 1,000-year decomposition cycle does not meet most people’s definitions of the term (Lapidos, 2007). The FTC guidelines made such claims false by law (Schneider, 1992).

Advertising’s Influence on Culture

Discussing advertising’s influence on culture raises a long-standing debate. One opinion states that advertising simply reflects the trends inherent in a culture, the other claims advertising takes an active role in shaping culture. Both ideas have merit and are most likely true to varying degrees.

Advertising and the Rise of Consumer Culture

George Babbitt, the protagonist of Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt , was a true believer in the growing American consumer culture:

Just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief…so did the national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. These standard advertised wares—toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters—were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, and then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom (Lewis, 1922).

Although Lewis’s fictional representation of a 1920s-era consumer may not be an actual person, it indicates the national consumer culture that was taking shape at the time. As it had always done, advertising sought to attach products to larger ideas and symbols of worth and cultural values. However, the rise of mass media and of the advertising models that these media embraced made advertising take on an increasingly influential cultural role.

Automobile ads of the 1920s portrayed cars as a new, free way of life rather than simply a means of transportation. Advertisers used new ideas about personal hygiene to sell products and ended up breaking taboos about public discussion of the body. The newly acknowledged epidemics of halitosis and body odor brought about products such as mouthwash and deodorant. A Listerine campaign of the era transformed bad breath from a nuisance into the mark of a sociopath (Ashenburg, 2008). Women’s underwear and menstruation went from being topics unsuitable for most family conversations to being fodder for the pages of national magazines. 15

Creating the Modern World

World War I bond campaigns had made it clear that advertising could be used to influence public beliefs and values. Advertising focused on the new—making new products and ideas seem better than older ones and ushering in a sense of the modernity. In an address to the American Association of Advertising Agencies in 1926, President Coolidge went as far as to hold advertisers responsible for the “regeneration and redemption of mankind (Marchand, 1985).”

Up through the 1960s, most advertising agencies were owned and staffed by affluent white men, and advertising’s portrayals of typical American families reflected this status quo. Mainstream culture as propagated by magazine, radio, and newspaper advertising was that of middle- or upper-class White suburban families (Marchand, 1985). This sanitized image of the suburban family, popularized in such TV programs as Leave It to Beaver , has been mercilessly satirized since the cultural backlash of the 1960s.

A great deal of that era’s cultural criticism targeted the image of the advertiser as a manipulator and promulgator of superficial consumerism. When advertisers for Volkswagen picked up on this criticism, turned it to their advantage, and created a new set of consumer symbols that would come to represent an age of rebellion, they neatly co-opted the arguments against advertising for their own purposes. In many instances, advertising has functioned as a codifier of its own ideals by taking new cultural values and turning them into symbols of a new phase of consumerism. This is the goal of effective advertising.

Apple’s 1984 campaign is one of the most well-known examples of defining a product in terms of new cultural trends. A fledgling company compared to computer giants IBM and Xerox, Apple spent nearly $2 million on a commercial that would end up only being aired once (McAloney, 1984). During the third quarter of the 1984 Super Bowl, viewers across the United States watched in amazement as an ad unlike any other at the time appeared on their TV screens. The commercial showed a drab gray auditorium where identical individuals sat in front of a large screen. On the screen was a man, addressing the audience with an eerily captivating voice. “We are one people, with one will,” he droned. “Our enemies shall talk themselves to death. And we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail (McAloney, 1984)!” While the audience sat motionlessly, one woman ran forward with a sledgehammer and threw it at the screen, causing it to explode in a flash of light and smoke. As the scene faded out, a narrator announced the product. “On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce the Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984 (Freidman, 1984).” With this commercial, Apple defined itself as a pioneer of the new generation. Instead of marketing its products as utilitarian tools, it advertised them as devices for combating conformity (Freidman, 1984). Over the next few decades, other companies imitated this approach, presenting their products as symbols of cultural values.

In his study of advertising’s cultural impact, The Conquest of Cool , Thomas Frank compares the advertising of the 1960s with that of the early 1990s:

How [advertisers] must have rejoiced when the leading minds of the culture industry announced the discovery of an all-new angry generation, the “Twenty-Somethings,” complete with a panoply of musical styles, hairdos, and verbal signifiers ready-made to rejuvenate advertising’s sagging credibility…. The strangest aspect of what followed wasn’t the immediate onslaught of even hipper advertising, but that the entire “Generation X” discourse repeated…the discussions of youth culture that had appeared in Advertising Age , Madison Avenue , and on all those youth-market panel discussions back in the sixties. 16

To be clear, advertisers have not set out to consciously manipulate the public in the name of consumer culture. Rather, advertisers are simply doing their job—one that has had an enormous influence on culture.

Advertising Stereotypes

The White, middle-class composition of ad agencies contributed to advertisements’ rare depictions of minority populations. DDB—the agency responsible for the Volkswagen ads of the 1960s—was an anomaly in this regard. One of its more popular ads was for Levy’s rye bread. Most conventional advertisers would have ignored the ethnic aspects of this product and simply marketed it to a mainstream White audience. Instead, the innovative agency created an ad campaign that made ethnic diversity a selling point, with spots featuring individuals from a variety of racial backgrounds eating the bread with the headline “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.”

During the 1950s, stereotypical images of African Americans promulgated by advertisers began to draw criticism from civil rights leaders. Icons such as Aunt Jemima, the Cream of Wheat chef, and the Hiram Walker butler were some of the most recognizable black figures in U.S. culture. Unlike the African Americans who had gained fame through their artistry, scholarship, and athleticism, however, these advertising characters were famous for being domestic servants.

During the 1960s, meetings of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) hosted civil rights leaders, and agencies began to respond to the criticisms of bias. A New York survey in the mid-1960s discovered that Blacks were underrepresented at advertising agencies. Many agencies responded by hiring new African American employees, and a number of Black-owned agencies started in the 1970s. 17

Early advertising frequently reached out to women because they made approximately 80 percent of all consumer purchases. Thus, women were well represented in advertising. However, those depictions presented women in extremely narrow roles. Through the 1960s, ads targeting women generally showed them performing domestic duties such as cooking or cleaning, whereas ads targeting men often placed women in a submissive sexual role even if the product lacked any overt sexual connotation. A National Car Rental ad from the early 1970s featured a disheveled female employee in a chair with the headline “Go Ahead, Take Advantage of Us.” Another ad from the 1970s pictured a man with new Dacron slacks standing on top of a woman, proclaiming, “It’s nice to have a girl around the house (Frauenfelder, 2008).”

An advertising profile printed in Advertising Age magazine gave a typical advertiser’s understanding of the housewife at the time:

She likes to watch TV and she does not enjoy reading a great deal. She is most easily reached through TV and the simple down-to-earth magazines…. Mental activity is arduous for her…. She is a person who wants to have things she can believe in rather than things she can think about (Rodnitzky, 1999).

The National Organization for Women (NOW) created a campaign during the early 1970s targeting the role of women in advertisements. Participants complained about the ads to networks and companies and even spray-painted slogans on offensive billboards in protest.

Representation of minorities and women in advertising has improved since the 1960s and ’70s, but it still remains a problem. The 2010 Super Bowl drew one of the most diverse audiences ever recorded for the event, including a 45 percent female audience. Yet the commercials remained focused strictly on men. And of 67 ads shown during the game, only four showed minority actors in a lead role. Despite the obvious economic benefit of diversity in marketing, advertising practices have resisted change (Ali, 2010).

Advertising to Children

The majority of advertisements that target children feature either toys or junk food. Children under the age of eight typically lack the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and many advertisers use this to their advantage. Studies have shown that most children-focused food advertisements feature high-calorie, low-nutrition foods such as sugary cereals. Although the government regulates advertising to children to a degree, the Internet has introduced new means of marketing to youth that have not been addressed. Online video games called advergames feature famous child-oriented products. The games differ from traditional advertising, however, because the children playing them will experience a much longer period of product exposure than they do from the typical 30-second TV commercial. Child advocacy groups have been pushing for increased regulation of advertising to children, but it remains to be seen whether this will take place (Calvert, 2008).

Positive Effects of Advertising

Although many people focus on advertising’s negative outcomes, the medium has provided unique benefits over time. Early newspaper advertising allowed newspapers to become independent of church and government control, encouraging the development of a free press with the ability to criticize powerful interests. When newspapers and magazines moved to an advertising model, these publications became accessible to large groups of people who previously could not afford them. Advertising also contributed to radio’s and TV’s most successful eras. Radio’s golden age in the 1940s and TV’s golden age in the 1950s both took place when advertisers were creating or heavily involved with the production of most of the programs.

Advertising also makes newer forms of media both useful and accessible. Many Internet services, such as e-mail and smartphone applications, are only free because they feature advertising. Advertising allows promoters and service providers to reduce and sometimes eliminate the upfront purchase price, making these services available to a greater number of people and allowing lower economic classes to take part in mass culture.

Advertising has also been a longtime promoter of the arts. During the Renaissance, painters and composers often relied on wealthy patrons or governments to promote their work. Corporate advertising has given artists new means to fund their creative efforts. In addition, many artists and writers have been able to support themselves by working for advertisers. The use of music in commercials, particularly in recent years, has provided musicians with notoriety and income. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the cultural landscape of the United States without advertising.

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3 Fox, 74–77.

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10 Fox, 324–325.

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Media Communication, Convergence and Literacy Copyright © by Enyonam Osei-Hwere and Patrick Osei-Hwere is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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