Reassessing the Impact of Television Advertising Clutter

Abstract

It has been suggested that increasing levels of clutter on television lead to diminished memory retrieval for advertised brands. Although earlier studies have shown that clutter decreases an individual's ability to recall a brand, it is not clear that clutter will have the same effect on other measures of memory. Two experiments with important methodologic differences from prior clutter studies investigated the impact of clutter on recognition, aided recall, and unaided recall. The results suggest that clutter may not significantly affect an individual's true ability to remember what was seen.