When it Pays to be Violent: Putting Commercials in Context

In this talk I present a series of studies investigating what kinds of commercials work best in what kinds of contexts. Although there has been a lot of research investigating what features make ads and commercials successful (tone, vividness, humor, attention grabbing, attention holding) and what commercials and ads work best for what type of audiences (children, adolescents, men, women, the elderly), there has been hardly any research that puts commercials in context and tests when commercials work best. Our work puts commercials in context by testing the effectiveness of different types of commercials in different types of contexts (e.g., a sexy movie, a violent movie, a humorous movie) and comes to a simple and straightforward conclusion: Because it does not pay to be different, it sometimes pays to be violent....