The correlation between humorous television advertisements and perceived cognitive responses

Abstract

Evaluating the effectiveness of advertising is an intricate task because its working is extremely complex as it depends on human response to communication. Today, advertising strategists extensively use humor as a means to reach their target audience and to be able to get that desired response to advertisements. Humor has been an integral part of advertising. However, there are controversies about the effectiveness of humorous advertisements as researches show. There is also lack of local literature discussing humor in advertisements in the Philippines. This study intends to find out if there is a relationship between humorous television advertisements and cognitive responses. This study used the non-probability quota sampling technique to be able to reach 100 respondents and took place in areas around Manila where consumers can be found such as malls, cafes, eateries, and convenience stores. Respondents were exposed to two humorous television advertisements and answered a survey questionnaire which measured their perceived humor, attention, memory, and comprehension on the advertisements. Central tendency (mean) and Pearson's R were used to compute the data and find out whether there is a relationship between humor and cognitive responses. Findings show that there is a strong positive linear relationship between perceived humor and cognitive responses to humorous advertisements with an overall mean of 3.7343 (11.203), with p = 0.682 at a = 0.1. There are moderate positive relationships among humor and memory (p = 0.414, a = 0.1), and humor and comprehension (p = 0.527, a = 0.1). There is a strong positive relationship in humor and attention (p = 0.758, a = 0.1)