Adolescents’ Attention to Responsibility Messages in Magazine Alcohol Advertisements: An Eye-Tracking ApproachJournal of Adolescent Health
Volume 41, Issue 1, July 2007, Pages 27-34
To investigate whether adolescent readers attend to responsibility or moderation messages (e.g., “drink responsibly”) included in magazine advertisements for alcoholic beverages and to assess the association between attention and the ability to accurately recall the content of these messages.
Overall, the responsibility or moderation messages were the least frequently viewed textual or visual areas of the advertisements. Participants spent an average of only .35 seconds, or 7% of the total viewing time, fixating on each responsibility message. Beverage bottles, product logos, and cartoon illustrations were the most frequently viewed elements of the advertisements.
Among those participants who fixated at least once on an advertisement’s warning message, only a relatively small percentage were able to recall its general concept or restate it verbatim in the masked recall test.
Voluntary responsibility or moderation messages failed to capture the attention of teenagers who participated in this study and need to be typographically modified to be more effective.
Reprint Request E-Mail: steven_thomsen@byu.edu
_____________________________________________________________
