Can We Measure Encoded Exposure? Validation Evidence from a National Campaign

Author's Abstract

"Exposure is often cited as an explanation for campaign success or failure. A lack of validation evidence for typical exposure measures, however, suggests the possibility of either misdirected measurement or incomplete conceptualization of the idea. If whether people engage campaign content in a basic, rudimentary manner is what matters when we talk about exposure, a recognition-based task should provide a useful measure of exposure, or what we might call encoded exposure, that we can validate. Data from two independent sources, the National Survey of Parents and Youth (NSPY) and purchase data from a national antidrug campaign, offer such validation. Both youth and their parents were much more likely to recognize actual campaign advertisements than to claim recognition of bogus advertisements. Also, gross rating points (GRPs) for a campaign advertisement correlated strikingly with average encoded exposure for an advertisement among both youth (r = 0.82) and their parents (r = 0.53)."

This paper focuses on United States youth and their parents. The authors conclude:

• Recognition-based measures appear to offer simple, valid indicators of past exposure that campaign researchers should employ whenever possible.
• Portable computers and emerging digital technologies appear to hold great promise for media campaign evaluation, allowing evaluators both to present multimedia content to respondents and to record responses with the same program.
• Achieving exposure in the U.S. is not cheap, as there generally appears to be a positive and linear relationship between the obtained media prevalence of campaign advertisements and the degree to which respondents remember being exposed to them.

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