The Effects of Program Involvement and Ease of Message Counterarguing on Advertising Persuasiveness

We investigated the effect of program involvement on the persuasive impact of an advertising message placed within the program. We found that an increase in program involvement enhanced the persuasive impact of an easy-to-coun-terargue advertising message and reduced the impact of a difficult-to-coun-terargue advertising message. These findings suggest that program environments generally have similar effects on the persuasiveness of contiguously presented advertising messages, as have been observed for distractors on concurrent message presentations. The implications of these findings for advertising theory and practice are discussed.