Untangling the cultural component behind the contextual placement of out-of-home advertising

Abstract

Companies frequently place out-of-home advertisements in locations hoping their brand becomes associated with that environment’s favorable attributes. However, prior research using U.S. subjects suggested that these associative benefits do not actually transfer onto the advertised brand. We faithfully replicate this earlier research using a non-Western sample and find that culturally based communication and cognitive processing models may explain the lack of results in the earlier study and affirmative results in our study. Three experimental conditions are used: single exposure, multiple exposures, and high involvement. We find that a billboard’s external environment does influence brand evaluations but only in the single-exposure condition. A possible explanation for why results were not evident in the multiple exposure and high involvement conditions may be related to the amount of message elaboration across study conditions.