A Cross-Cultural/Cross-National Study of the Information Content of Television Advertisements

Abstract

The difficulty of communicating to people of diverse cultures and nations is one of the greatest creative challenges in international advertising. In most cases, differences in cultural and other environmental factors would result in perceptual differences and thus necessitate the use of different types of advertising media and messages. The purpose of this study was to investigate cross-cultural and cross-national differences in marketing communications. The study extends an earlier work conducted by Dowling (1980) on the information content of TV advertising. Television commercials were selected from 6 different channels, 3 in Maine and 3 in the Maritime region of Canada. Commercials were selected on each day of the week by a multi-stage random-selection process. Three bilingual judges were presented with fourteen criteria to be used in determining whether an advertisement was to be classified as informative or non-informative. An examination of the overall informativeness of the advertisements selected showed that 68.2 per cent were informative at the one or more cue level and 25.7 per cent were judged to have two or more information cues. The data also clearly indicated that French Canadian television commercials contain more information (a larger proportion of commercials with two or more information cues) than American television commercials. The information content in advertisements within product classes was found to be higher for French Canadian commercials.