Low Involvement Processing: time to rethink ad research?

Roderick White

WARC Hot Topics are the essential guide to debates in and around marketing. This paper explores the key issues surrounding LIP, with onward links to related papers on WARC and the Web.

Low-Involvement Processing - time to rethink ad research?

June 2003

INTRODUCTION

People frequently see ads, and remember them (in a sense), without realising that they are doing so. So, conventional research based on ad recall is at best misleading.

This summarises very crudely Robert Heath's far more expansive theories on so-called low-involvement processing (LIP) of advertising, which have caused considerable controversy, particularly in ad-testing circles.

Heath's theories are based on modern neuroscientific and cognitive psychology views of how we attend to things like ads, how our minds and memories process them, and how subsequently...

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