ABSTRACT
On-air promotion’s relevance to prime-time television ratings has been beyond question for the last 3 decades. To date, most scholarly research about promotion has focused on the structural characteristics of on-air promotion. Studies have attempted to describe and measure such attributes as style and frequency (Owens & Bryant, 1998), frequency and ratings (Walker, 1993), and design and placement (Eastman & Newton, 1998a). The studies have generally looked at the impact of on-air promotion on the subsequent ratings for a program, looking either for up/down movement of ratings or the variance accounted for as in regression analyses, and one line of studies culminated in the testing of the salience model (also described in Perse, chap. 2, this volume). Much of this research presumes that self-driven channel-changing activity by television audiences is relatively minimal and thus viewers are able to be impacted to a modest extent by such external motivators as on-air promos that subtly influence viewers’ enjoyment of programs.
