Issue Versus Image Orientation and Effects of Political Advertising

Melding uses and gratifications and information-processing perspectives, an experiment was constructed to investigate how media channel and audience motivation for attending to a political advertisement govern the processing and effect of the ad. A 2×2 factorial design (N=153) was used. Subjects were instructed to attend to a political ad “to learn where the candidate stands on issues” (issue motivational set) or “to form an impression of the candidate's personality” (image motivational set). In addition, subjects either viewed a two-channel political television ad (audio-video condition) or listened only to the audio portion (audio-only condition). Subjects attending to learn issue information were most likely to become informed and were more confident in their learning than were subjects attending to form a personality impression. Those attending to form a personality impression paid greater attention to the video portion of the ad and had greater confidence in their recall of video information. They were also more likely than were issue attenders to base their inferences of the candidate's traits on information contained in the ad rather than on assumptions about how traits are interrelated. No differences by channel condition were found.