Direct-to-Consumer Advertising

The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of different formats of warning information disclosure in printed drug advertisements on a sample of adults' cognitive reactions. Four mock advertisements for a fictitious influenza virus vaccine, all of which contained the same promotional message, were tested. The format of the warning disclosure varied in three of the advertisements. An advertisement which contained no warning message was also tested. Study subjects consisting of 192 patrons of a local shopping center each read one of the four advertisements and then completed a self-administered questionnaire that had 13 scaled items focusing on semantics. A sequence of analytical steps including factor analysis, analysis of variance and the Scheffe post-hoc multiple comparisons test suggest that the format of warning disclosure did have an effect on consumers' cognitive reactions described by the informative value, security, and appeal factors. A trade-off appears to have resulted in the minds o...