Dominant Advertisement Strategies in Iranian TV Commercials and their Cognitive Effect

Advertising strategies are some factors in the content and form of advertisements which are intended to have certain effects on ad viewers or potential customers. These effects could be defined as the kind of cognitive responses they are expected to elicit in their audiences. This study examined 39 Iranian TV commercials in seven product categories to identify the most dominant strategies used by the advertisers and investigated the effect of product type on the selection and use of these strategies. The results showed that Iranian TV commercials used a mixture of analytic and effective cognitive strategies among which “elaborating on the reasons to buy”, “explaining the quality appeal” are the most favorite analytic based strategies and use of emotion and mood arising words is the most dominant affective based advertising method. The results also endorse significant effect of product type on types of strategies employed in the ads.