Beyond response

While the strength of direct response advertising lies in its accountability, trends in the direct marketing industry indicate other effectiveness measures, to complement sales, are needed for enhancing long-term customer relationships. Two such effectiveness measures are ad likability and feeling toward direct response products/services. Thirty randomly selected direct response print ads were evaluated by 146 respondents yielding 730 ad evaluations regarding perceptions that impact ad likability and feeling toward direct response products/services. A factor analysis of 27 content scales resulted in 5 ad content categories. The 5 content categories were used to examine their impact on feelings and likability of direct response advertisements.