Advertising Wear-Out

What it is

Wear-out is the downside of the mere exposure effect, the finding that people come to like things they have seen often. Robert Zajonc showed in 1968 that nonsense words, Chinese-like characters and photographs of faces were rated more favourably the more often people had seen them. Repetition helps, up to a point. Wear-out is what happens past that point.

The 1980 study, by Bobby Calder and Brian Sternthal, looked at it from an information processing view. Its abstract reports that repetition caused wear-out in how viewers evaluated the commercials and the products being advertised, and that wear-out "was not forestalled by strategies designed to enhance attention."

In effect

The broader research on repetition shows the same rise and fall. A 2017 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin by R. Matthew Montoya and colleagues drew 268 curve estimates from 81 articles and found that liking rises and then falls with repeated exposure, an inverted U, for visual stimuli though not for sounds. An earlier review by Robert Bornstein, published in 1989, found that the size of the exposure effect depended on the type of stimulus, its complexity, the order of presentation, the length of each exposure and whether people recognised what they had seen.

Music offers a useful comparison. In a 2004 study at the University of Toronto Mississauga, Karl Szpunar, Glenn Schellenberg and Patricia Pliner played orchestral excerpts to students up to 32 times. With close listening, liking rose and then fell, and after 32 exposures the benefits of exposure were no longer apparent. When the music was heard incidentally, liking kept rising. That suggests repetition met in passing wears out more slowly than repetition met head-on, though the study was about music rather than advertising.

What it does not say

It does not give a fixed number of showings after which an advert stops working. The turning point depends on what is repeated, how closely people attend to it and how many times they have already met it. The 2017 meta-analysis concluded that existing models of the mere exposure effect do not adequately account for its findings.

Nor does it say repetition is bad. The rising half of the curve is as well supported as the falling half, and the 1980 finding concerns a pattern of commercials repeated beyond that rise.

---