How Clutter Affects Advertising Effectiveness
Peter Hammer, Erica Riebe and Rachel KennedyEhrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science
INTRODUCTION
“Clutter” describes the level of advertising and other nonprogramming material within a medium (Speck and Elliott, 1998). Advertising clutter across media is at an all-time high and now has reached daunting proportions in many countries (White and Dawson, 2007). Some observe that a more cluttered environment reduces advertising viewing (Webb and Ray, 1979), increases avoidance (Speck and Elliott, 1998), impairs advertising memories (e.g., Cobb, 1985; Webb and Ray, 1979), inhibits the ability of audiences to correctly identify the...