The Effects of Music Familiarity, Formats of Background Music and Formats of Ad Message on Advertising Memory

Commercials with both sound and visual effects are very common in life. Nowadays, many advertisers use pop music that is irrelevant to ad/product messages in their commercials, and at the same time they also use an announcer to deliver the brand/product messages. However, when the audience hears both the “vocal” in the music and the “voice” of the announcer in the commercial, what are the overall memory effects of combining these executional cues? Is this really an effective way to increase the brand/product memory of the audience? Given that there seems a gap between the practices and adcademic researches in the advertising field on this topic, this research aims to discover the main memory effects as well as interaction effects of the three factors: music familiarity, formats of background music (vocal and instrumental), and formats of ad message (voice messages and written messages). In order to test the memory of the participants, this research takes a 2 x 2 x 2 approach, using a pretest to choose two songs as experiment materials to represent the familiar and the unfamiliar song respectively, and also choosing a real commercial to set up 8 different situations. This research finds that: (1) There is no significant difference of the ad memory effects between familiar and of unfamiliar music, whereas the familiar music situtations have a higher score of ad attention. (2) Compared with instrumental music, music with a vocal will lead to higher score of product recognition. (3) The ad memory of the situations with an announcer’s voice delivering ad messages is higher than that of situations with written ad messages. (4) When the ad music is familiar, if there is also vocal in the music, the score of product recognition is higher if the ad messages are delivered by an announcer, than through written words. (5) When the ad music is unfamiliar, if the music is instrumental without a vocal, the score of product recognition is higher if the ad messages are delivered by an announcer, than through written words. In general, this research explores a new topic in terms of the adcademic researches of ad music. After testing its hypothesis based on its compararison of the results of previous literatures, it has some findings and also provides some suggestions for the execution of commercials in real practices.