ABSTRACT

At some level, a goal of any advertisement is to increase the ability of a company to sell their product or service. Of course, ads also cost money. Hence, advertising effectiveness can be thought of as a reasonable return on investment (ROI). This very general definition of advertising effectiveness begs the questions of how to create ads that increase ROI, and how to diagnose the problem when satisfactory ROI is not achieved. For both questions, latent factors and constructs thought to enhance or detract from advertising success will play a central role. When an ad can be shown to influence one of these latent constructs, the ad can be said to have an advertising effect (see also Wright-Isak, Faber, & Horner, 1997, for the distinction between advertising effectiveness and advertising effects). Because practitioners can rarely pretest ads by following recipients over long periods of times to check on actual purchase behavior, they will often rely on the measurement of advertising effects to make predictions about general advertising effectiveness (ROI). Researchers, more interested in the interrelationships between constructs and theory, may be primarily interested in advertising effects, though they may often venture to generalize into the realm of advertising effectiveness. For both researchers and practitioners, the generalizability of a given measure of an advertising effect to other measures of advertising effects, or advertising effectiveness in general, is of paramount importance.