1.0 Abstract (page 2)
2.0 Introduction
The purpose of this research is to analyze the impact of TV commercials on consumer purchases focusing on millennials. To do so we reviewed seven scholarly articles which took a deeper look into the influence of television sports, athlete endorsements, cross platform advertising and many more. This topic is important because our group wanted to analyze the manner in which millennials purchase behavior is affected by television commercials, a critical research component for advertisers and agencies alike.
3.0 Literature Review
3.1 Lit Review: Generation Y: Generation Y, those who were born from 1977 to 1997, also known as Millennials or the internet generation are one of the most affluent generations. They are the wealthiest generation in American history making them an extremely powerful market segment. There are over 80 million people in the Generation Y making them grab the attention of advertisers with $600 billion being spent annually by them. Millennials have $150 billion in direct purchasing power as of 2002, “more than the parents had at their age” (Farris) and about $500 billion in indirect purchasing power today.
Millennials grew up with both parents working outside the home forcing them to become more self sufficient and responsible. This affected the way parents treated them as they saw them as equals and asked for their opinion when it came to important purchasing decisions. Generation Y was raised with considerable more interest in money than prior generations. Technology fueled their knowledge as easy to read information was easily accessible. They grew up “understanding the new digital economy” as the communication revolution was transforming everyday life. Millennials feel like they have control over the internet contrary to Television.
Teens who grew up in this generation are fickle with new trends and are really only interested in buying products that relate to their life . In order to properly advertise to this generation, advertisers need to sell the lifestyle rather than the product, exclusively. Due to their media savviness, millennials do not fall easily for advertisements. They use the internet as a tool to find reviews about the product being advertised before purchasing it to make an informed decision. They are more interested in the value of products and variety, in other words, having many choices, while they are not too worried about the cost of the product as long as it proves its value through the years. They are brand conscious and loyal to brands that make it a point to relate to their wants and needs. They are also socially responsible like their baby boomer parents.
In order to reach this generation, marketers need to understand the lives of millennials and how they think. In a focus group that was conducted with millennials, researchers discovered that millennials enjoy ads that are geared directly towards them, or in other words, ads that were personalized. Television still works as a form of reaching this generation but less and less as internet takes a bigger role in their lives.
Overall, the impact of Generation Y or millennials increases as their purchasing power becomes more prominent. According to Mark L. Alch, former adjunct professor at University of California Irvine, millennials “will create a new economic boom of increased productivity, real wage gains, rising savings, and falling debt” creating a new work environment emphasized by their independence.
3.2 Lit Review: Can Demographic Profiles of Heavy Users Serve as Surrogate for Purchase Behavior in Selecting TV Programs?: Standard advertising agencies use three primary demographic categories in relation to ages. These categories are 18 to 49, 25 to 54 and 55 plus, the classification is then broken down additionally to males, females, as well as the head of the household. Assael and Poltrack suggest that ‘in no case do traditional demographic criteria serve as adequate surrogates for purchase behavior.’ Therefore, the standard method of breaking the audience into ages is not sufficient enough to learn about the buying behavior of individuals.
The article suggests heavily that the timing of a commercial is not selected on a basis of product-usage criteria, however, some TV show audiences are more likely than others to be heavy users of the product. It then recommends that media selection should be based on purchase criteria, independent of demographics. However, some argue that refined demographic profiles can do just the same as purchase criteria in the efficiency of media selection.
Assael and Poltrack focused on three criteria: cost, program exposure, and purchase incidence for a product category. The defined target for the highest purchase incidence allowed for selected TV shows that would best reach the audience when considering methods for this article. Assael and Poltrack defined females to be the heaviest purchase group for two thirds of the categories.
About six shows selected by both gross demographics and by heavy user profiles overlapped with those selected by purchases.
The findings from this article reinforces our prior conclusion that the gross demographic criteria traditionally utilized in bulk buying are poor surrogates for purchase behavior.
A heavy user profile seems to be a reasonable surrogate for purchase behavior for these two categories
The authors could not conclude that heavy user profiles can be safely used as surrogates for purchase behavior. However, they can be used as surrogates for only certain product categories.
3.3 Literature Review: Cross-Media Communication in Advertising: Exploring Multimodal Connections Between Television Commercials and Websites
Jessen and Graakjer suggest that the relationship between television and websites can be understood in a push and pull effect. The article reviewed many different examples of cross media communication in advertising with one of them suggesting that the television and the website connect in various ways. One example was from a YouSee advertisement where the website offers an ‘order now’ button and follows the same character stripes as the commercial advertisement did. The push and pull relationship between the order now button and the cohesive design across platforms illustrates this dynamic by offering action items that compliment the original advertisement.
The push and pull relationship was defined more in depth throughout the article. It suggested that viewers are pushed by the content on television and is more evident when looking at genre of advertising in television. The difference between television commercials and websites is that websites are visited on purpose. A commercial will refer to a website but websites do not send consumers to commercials, as commercials are something we ‘come across.’ This suggests that television commercials need the audience’s attention but websites already have some level of attention as many website advertisements are on the basis of website cookies and previous viewing habits.
“Roughly two thirds of millennials view comes from traditional TV,” (McPherson, 2014)
Hypotheses (subheading) at least three hypotheses that you test. Provide a rationale from your lit review for each hypothesis
3.4 Exploring The Influence of Television Sport on Consumers’ Attitudes Towards Programme-Embedded Advertising Using Motivational Responses Generated by the Game
The importance for sports marketers to understand what the system of motivation will be for sporting events viewing are critical when creating advertising campaigns. This article analyzed the effect on consumer purchase behavior when watching big sporting events such as the Super Bowl.
It also took a look at athlete endorsements, suggesting that they result in a positive manner based on the relationship of the athlete and the product.
The article found that their idea was supported in that television programming activities relativity, motivation, advertisements embedded in that program are more likeable when the ads contain cues that appeal to the same motivation.
3.5 Differential Effects of Television Commercials, Athlete Endorsements, and Venue Signage During a Televised Action Sports Event
This study found that television commercials during athletic events are the most common forms of advertising. Sports events have 75% of American audiences are watching at least once a week. In 2002, corporations spent over $58 billion on TV commercial advertisements, (Cianfrone, Zhang, 324).
The article examined experimental versus control television commercial groups, control venue signage groups, control combined promotional groups and control athlete endorsement groups.
3.6 The Conundrum of Emerging Media and Television Advertising Clutter
Emerging media is threatening broadcast and cable advertising revenue as advertiser avoidance becomes more prominent due to the increase of commercial clutter. As new technologies come into the market, avoiding television commercials becomes easier, creating a major challenge for broadcast and cable television as they start to face difficulties as to how to deliver audiences, or eyeballs to advertisers.
Since the beginnings of media in the United States, advertising has supported and been the primary form of revenue for these entities such as television and radio. However, as programming became more expensive due to higher quality productions, the search for money increased. In 1984, primetime advertising was 9 1/2 minutes per hour. This quickly changed and has only increased. By 1998, primetime advertising or “commercial clutter” was 15 minutes per hour. As of 2002, the American Association of Advertising Agencies reported advertising clutter at 16 minutes per hour to 21 minutes per hour during daytime television. In 2008, popular shows such as Grey’s Anatomy had as much as 20 minutes of advertising.
Although one would think that as advertising clutter increases the less effective these ads would be, reattach show no negative effects on advertising effectiveness. Diving deeper into the research, the research showed “no difference of commercial viewing on cluttered environments versus non-cluttered environments”. These results however might be because people have learned how to survive or cope in an ad-cluttered environment. Some “coping strategies” include channel surfing and using digital video recorders (DVR). In today’s world it has become easier to cope with advertising clutter as there are more ways to access television programming or content other than watching a TV station or cable network.
Nielsen noted that watching television in the United States is at an all-time high. However, millennials are spending more time watching content online than any other age group. Although Nielsen reports on the power that television still has when it comes to having eyeballs, 94.5% of people who watch television have reported to not paying attention during television advertising, with most people engaging in other activities when ads would come on. For example, Nielsen believes 57% of viewers, which is a total of 128 million people in the United States, use their phone while watching TV. Therefore, audience members who still watch television without a DVR or online are not effectively paying attention to advertisements.
Advertisers are scrambling as to how they can regain these eyeballs. Since the integration of DVR and TiVo into the media world, 84% of potential audience for commercials has been lost in programs, with the most popular shows having the least watched ads as people skipped advertisements quicker. Some solutions advertisers have found are making ads more relevant to the content of the program in order to engage viewers, product placements in programs, and product integration. By using product placement, display of a product in the show, and product integration, incorporating advertised products into the script of the program has allowed for a more effective way of advertising while engaging audiences. However, although engaging, product placement and product integration brings nowhere near as much revenue for broadcasters and cable networks as television commercials does.
Interestingly enough, there exists a generation gap in audiences as millennials, 18-34, grew up in a cluttered environment while older generations did not, and watched as non-cluttered environments became cluttered. However, millennials were born into a decade with remote controls making channel surfing a common coping strategy.
As advertising avoidance becomes more prevalent in television viewership, advertisers need to make advertisements more interactive, engaging, and relative to viewer’s lives as commercial skipping with DVRs will rise.
3.7 Adopting Television as a New Channel for E-commerce. The Influence of Interactive Technologies on Consumer Behavior
Lorena Blasco-Arcas, Blanca Hernández-Ortega and Julio Jimenez-Martinez conducted an experiment trying to find the influence of personalization and interactivity on consumers through media. The revolution of technology in the past decade has allowed for the emergence of new forms of commerce, specifically e-commerce, which is done online. Television, smartphones, tablets, computers, and many more forms of media and technology have facilitated forms of consuming and therefore purchasing products. Television has shifted to an entertainment medium, while the internet has shifted to an information medium.
Through the experiment, the researchers were able to find that people are more interested in personalized programming or content than in mass content. As social media and the internet take a more prevalent role in the lives of consumers, consumers can now select what they want to watch and how they want to watch it. Therefore, this increases interactivity with the content being watched. This leads to the realization that consumers who have low involvement can become highly involved due to the “influence of a specific feature… offered by the communication medium”. In other words, the more relevant something is to a consumer’s life, the higher the involvement is from the consumer with the content.
Overall, the researchers found that interactivity and personalization creates an active consumer. Interactive tools such as blogs and social media influence consumers purchases and gives them a sense of community and belonging making consuming content a lot more enjoyable for viewers. Finally, their results proved significance between “personalization and interactivity on involvement with the service and perceived channel performance.”
3.8 Analysis of hypotheses in comparison to lit review: Throughout our analysis of the literature review articles, we found the result to study the purchase behavior of millennials and television commercials was overall positive. Therefore, we furthered our study to analyze purchase behavior and suggested in our hypotheses that some effects could be gender based or vary by programming.
4.0 Method
4.1 Conceptual and operational definitions
-Conceptual definition of the dependent variable: beliefs about the influence/effect ?
4.2 Population and sample
Being that the topic which we sought out to research was the impact television commercials have on purchases of consumers, more closely focusing on the specific population or group of subjects that is millennials, our data was collected from those born between the years of 1977 and 1997. Staying consistent with this crucial characteristic and so as to narrow down the potential subjects (examining each member in the entire population or gathering a census was not feasible), we studied a subset group representative of this population. This sample consisted of students currently attending the University of Miami. This sample was further broken down quantitatively by the ratio variable of age, and qualitatively by the nominal variable of gender.
4.3 Data collection
So as to collect the necessary data to test our hypotheses, we conducted a survey using the survey tool Qualtrics. Qualtrics is an easy-to-use, full-featured, web-based tool for creating and conducting online surveys and questionnaires. Utilized by many universities, Qualtrics offers features limiting its incoming traffic to only those in attendance of the University. This feature assisted us in ensuring that our data was being gathered from the correct sample.
The research design used was cross sectional. In this type of research, data are collected from a representative sample at only one point in time. In contrast, longitudinal research involves the collection of data at different points in time. In cross sectional research, numerous groups from which data are collected are studied at once.
Throughout the months of October and November of 2017, we conducted our online survey questionnaire using Qualtrics. This yielded 65 responses from students at the University of Miami. This survey was intended to gather data on the impact television commercials have on purchases of consumers within the millennial population. To disperse the survey, we sent the link via email and text messaging to fellow classmates and friends and posted in University Facebook groups. The survey was generally completed by all participants in its entirety (some questions were left blank).
4.4 MARI Statistical tests used to test hypotheses (BTW WE USED T-TEST AND CODE CORRELATIONS)
I’ll do this part move on to another one (mari)
5.0 Findings
5.1 Description of sample (gender, age, ethnicity)
Out of those who participated in the study, 72.3% were female, 24.6% were male, 1.5% reported themselves as other, and 1.5% are undetermined. Out of the 65 responses, the mean age came out to 21.7. Ethnicity was not necessary for the study. The mean disposable income of respondents came out to be $809.77 per month
5.2 Hypotheses test (restate each hypothesis, insert statistical test tables, interpret tables)
6.0 Discussion and conclusions
6.1 Discussion
broader meaning of results
if applicable why some hypotheses not supported
Weaknesses
directions for future research
6.2 Conclusion
Originally published 15.10.2019