ABSTRACT
This chapter explores advertising reception from three different perspectives: effects studies; uses and gratifications; and the decoding aspect of the advertising framework. The effects studies approach to understanding audience reception, associated with the work of Paul Lazerfeld and James Klapper, has been described as search for specific, measurable, short-term, individual, attitudinal and behavioural effects. In uses and gratifications thinking audience is deemed to be active and to make choices about which advertisements to give attention to and what to do with the information. It has advertising research, creating predictive and increasingly detailed models of consumer preference. The concepts of desire, the pleasure and reality principle, attitude, cognitive dissonance and chains of association have added to marketing research tools. Decoding, element of the advertising framework of encoding-texts-decoding enables an understanding of reception and cultural and social experiences of advertising audiences. Stuart Hall described decoding positions, important element of the advertising framework as hypothetical decoding positions or ideal-typical positions.
