ABSTRACT
Can gender-related variables predict the effectiveness of gendered advertisements? Intuitively individual differences such as gender attitudes should help explain reactions to gendered ads above and beyond the content of stereotypes featured in them. This chapter reviews relevant empirical literature on gender-related psychographic predictors of advertising effectiveness and reveals conflicting findings. In offering a solution I draw on advances in social psychology and social-cognition such as Ambivalent Sexism Theory (Glick & Fiske, 1996) and Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, 1995; Greenwald, Rudman, Nosek, Banaji, Farnham & Mellott, 2002; Greenwald, Banaji & Nosek, 2015). I provide insights obtained from my investigation of the usefulness of various measures of gender attitudes in predicting advertising effectiveness (Zawisza & Cinnirella, 2010; Zawisza et al., 2016, 2018) as well as my novel adaptation of measures of implicit gender attitudes and their superior predictive power in advertising context vis-à-vis the traditional explicit measures (Zawisza & Lobban, 2015).
