Media Placement versus Advertising Execution

We make three contributions towards understanding how engagement with the surrounding editorial context affects reactions to ads. First, while previous studies have shown that respondent-level engagement affects ads, we argue that vehicle-level engagement is more relevant to placement decisions, and show that magazine-level engagement affects actions taken from seeing an ad. Second, we compare the relative importance of engagement to the execution factors size, position and colour, and show that engagement is of comparable importance. Third, evaluations are done with more realistic procedures than previous studies and with real ads.