Foreword
A sad truth about academic research on advertising is that much of it has little direct application to the practice of advertising. The stimuli used are typically not real ads. They appear in isolation and out of context. Thus, the exposure situation is very different from how real ads are encountered. Hypothetical brands are generally employed so that any prior knowledge about the brand is eliminated from consideration. To make matters worse, the factors that comprise the most interesting and unique aspects of advertising are among the characteristics that are the least often studied. It is, therefore, exciting to come across a work that manages to overcome the flaws that so plague most research in our field and limit its contribution to actual advertising. This is one such work. It manages to combine and address a number of the areas that are essential to the unique nature of advertising and thereby shed light on practices that are important to understanding when and why it will be successful.
In the last few years, theoretical efforts from our research group in Minnesota have attempted to shed light on what makes advertising distinct from other types of mass and interpersonal communication. We