Assessing when increased media weight of real-world advertisements helps sales

A prevailing view is that increased media weight for frequently purchased brands in mature product categories usually does not lead to increases in sales. However, the role of advertising executional cues and viewer responses on media weight-induced sales has not yet been examined. The authors find that whether weight helps or has no sales impact depends on the creative characteristics of the advertisements and the responses they evoke in viewers. Study 1 showed that real-world advertisements for frequently purchased brands in mature categories were likely to create greater media weight-induced sales when they used affectively based executional cues. Study 2 found that greater media weight was related to the sales impact of advertisements that evoked positive feelings and failed to evoke negative feelings in viewers. The authors develop hypotheses related to these results within the context of prior work on consumer persuasion (including the elaboration likelihood model), memory processes, and advertising wearout.