The Information Processing of Coordinated Media Campaigns

Marketers are increasingly coordinating their advertising campaigns across media. The authors use information processing theory to examine consumer response to coordinated TV and radio ads. “Radio replay” is defined to occur when a consumer views a TV ad and later hears the audio track from the TV ad as a radio ad. The outcomes from radio replay are posited to depend on the relative extent of comprehension, retrieval, and elaborative processes that consumers undertake during the reinforcing radio ad exposure. The results of a laboratory experiment examining coordinated radio and TV ads show that when consumers heard a radio replay, they did very little critical, evaluative processing. Rather, they appeared to replay mentally the video from the television ad. Recall results are consistent with this processing. Judgments of the ads and the brands, however, are as positive for radio replay as they are for the television repetition condition. Implications of these findings for advertising theory and practice are discussed.