Examining effects of advertising campaign publicity in a field study

Previous experimental research found that the pre-exposure of publicity about advertisements has two distinct but related effects in advertised brand recall: (a) a facilitative effect on publicized brands and (b) an inhibitive effect on nonpublicized brands. We speculate that publicity effects exist beyond the controlled experiments. In this article, we used a field study to investigate the effects of publicity messages related to the commercials aired during three Super Bowl games. We found that publicity had a positive impact on the memory of subsequent advertisements for both recall and recognition, but publicity effects were more evident in recall than in recognition.